If there’s any documentary in this young year that should bring a divided America together, it’s “The Path of the Panther,” a multifaceted portrait of the plight of this endangered mammal that’s been at least six years in the making. Opening today in Boca Raton and Boynton Beach, director Eric Bendick’s film centers on National Geographic Explorer and wildlife advocate Carlton Ward Jr. as he tromps through the Everglades, endeavoring to snap photographic evidence of the dwindling Florida panther.
Its historic habitat all but decimated by residential development, highways and climate change, the panther population had been reduced to numbers in the low teens when Ward embarked on this project. At the time, not a single panther had been documented north of the Caloosahatchee River since 1973.
By setting camera traps and enduring all manner of natural challenges—from bears dismantling his technology to Hurricane Irma sinking his camera rig—Ward, in 2016, finally captured the first evidence of a single female panther prowling this otherwise depopulated sector. “The Path of the Panther” follows this revelation as it’s happening, and charts its historic aftermath, in which Ward’s majestic photographs of the animal aid in his efforts to establish an official Florida Wildlife Corridor to protect the species and restore some of its land.
Along the way, director Bendick spends time with a few of Ward’s allies in the state. We meet a veterinary surgeon at ZooTampa who is able to save the lives of certain panthers struck by automobiles, and a colorful rancher and DeSoto County Commissioner whose own livelihood is threatened by the shrinkage of Florida’s agricultural reserves. A member of the Miccosukee First Nation reflects on the panther’s storied role in the tribe’s mythos as a protector and nurturer of all things—a steward of the environment as a whole. This idea, that the panther is the canary in the coalmine for a wild Florida that has been crucially diminished, is the beating heart of Bendick’s film.
While “The Path of the Panther” seems at times to serve as an elegy for what’s already lost, it’s equally a celebration for what remains. It contains some of the most lyrical nature video of any documentary of recent vintage, with both Bendick and Ward lensing not just panthers but the menagerie of Florida flora and fauna, from spoonbills and herons to alligators and raccoons to barred owls and ghost orchids. Ward’s images of newly discovered panthers are majestic, and successfully tug at our heartstrings, but the same goes for his high-def captures of the Glades’ other splashing, swooping, twittering denizens.
Unlike documentaries that present an existential problem and leave it up to viewers to solve it, the producers of “The Path of the Panther” have already achieved monumental legislative successes, culminating in the signing of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act in 2021, a point of rare agreement between the left-leaning environmental movement and the DeSantis Administration.
There is still more that could be done to protect and sustain the Florida panther, but this film is that rare “issue” movie that also strikes notes of optimism. You’ll feel better after having seen it, knowing that people like Ward are out there, literally in the muck, making Florida a better place for all of us.
“The Path of the Panther” opens today at Cinemark Palace in Boca Raton, Cinemark Boynton Beach, and Silverspot Cinemas in Coconut Creek, among other theaters.
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