Richard Ladkani (born July 21, 1973) is an independent Austrian director and cinematographer known for documentary films such as The Ivory Game and Sea of Shadows.
[4] Since then, Ladkani has worked as both director and cinematographer on numerous documentaries including My Vietnam, The Devil's Miner, Vatican – The Hidden World, Gas Monopoly and Killerflu amongst others.
[5][6] Jane Goodall supported both The Ivory Game and Sea of Shadows as an honorary ambassador, lending her voice to the promotion of the documentaries.
[5] In 2020, Richard Ladkani became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch, which awards the Oscars every year.
The film focuses on Basilio Vargas, a fourteen-year-old Bolivian boy who works in the silver mines near the city of Potosí with his twelve-year-old brother Bernardino.
[2][16] This documentary directed by Tom Cappello and shot by Richard Ladkani and Nick Higgins follows three women from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mali and Vietnam who fight against ignorance, poverty, oppression, and ethnic strife.
[18] The film Killerflu 2008, written and co-directed by Bärbel Jacks and Richard Ladkani, was shot as a fictional documentary flashback from 2010 on the course of an influenza pandemic.
[20] With partially previously unpublished CIA archive material, Marc Eberle tells the story of this war, which in many ways became the precursor for today's American warfare.
Contemporary witnesses such as former officers and pilots of the CIA and the Hmong army, intelligence experts and journalists tell of the consequences of this war.
The film educates about the Vatican through its employees, including the Pope's personal photographer Francesco Sforza, his bodyguard, the journalist Gudrun Seiler [de] and the altar boy Valentino Dumitrana.
The film chronicles Goodall's field research and explores the challenges she faces as a woman in the scientific world, documenting her ongoing efforts in environmental protection around the globe.
[33] Directors Richard Ladkani, Kief Davidson and their team filmed for 16 months to uncover the global network of the ivory trade.
[7][40] Directed by Richard Ladkani and executive-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Sea of Shadows is a Terra Mater production in association with Malaika Pictures and Appian Way.
Shot over several months in 2018, the film is set in the Gulf of California on the Mexican coast, where illegal fishermen use giant gillnets and criminal methods to hunt the rare totoaba fish, whose swim bladder has a huge market value in China.
[43] Ladkani follows investigative journalists, environmental activists, undercover intelligence agents and marine biologists in their fight to save a species whose disappearance is a metaphor for man's overexploitation of nature.