Simon Trevor’s passion and dedication to Africa’s wildlife has led him to produce many award-winning films, and play an important part in promoting the role of Africa’s national parks.
Simon and his family moved from England to Africa in 1946, when he was seven years old. He was given his first 8mm film camera when he was aged 15 and practiced filming birds and small animals. In 1955 he began working as a junior engineer on the Kariba dam project and then for the Rhodesian Government, before working as a game warden in Tsavo National Park in 1959.
In 1962, Simon left the park and dedicated himself to full time filmmaking in order to create awareness of the critical situation facing Africa’s wildlife. He began working with Des Bartlett on Operation Noah; a film that documented the rescue and translocation of thousands of animals due to the Kariba dam project. He then spent the next two years filming On Safari films for Armand Denis.
After the On Safari travelogue ended, Simon gained diverse experience filming television drama series, feature films and wildlife documentaries for charities such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Wildlife Clubs of Kenya. In 1979, Simon was nominated for a BAFTA for best documentary programme in A World About us Special: Bloody Ivory, before producing River of Sand for the long running Survival series, which was also nominated for a BAFTA. This success led to a long term collaboration between Simon and Survival Anglia, and in 1986 Simon and Survival produced Together They Stand; a film about the African mongoose that won the prestigious Golden Panda award at the Wildscreen Film Festival in Great Britain.
Simon continued to film for Survival and also film wildlife sequences for feature films up until 1998, when he started the African Environmental Film Foundation (AEFF), a not-for-profit conservation organisation dedicated to creating educative films in African languages. Simon also dubbed three Survival films into several indigenous languages for local distribution in Africa, stopping commercial filmmaking completely in 1999 in order to dedicate his time fully to AEFF.
Simon is an honorary warden of the Kenya Wildlife Service; donating funds from his films to help conserve the national parks, and continues to passionately and diligently make films that create awareness of the need to conserve and protect the biodiversity of Africa’s national parks.
View the oral history of Simon Trevor Together They Stand (1985) | Producer, Director, Camera |
| Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey (1988) | Camera operator, Director of Photography |
| The Elephants of Tsavo: Love & Betrayal (1990) | Photography, Producer |
