Iconic David Attenborough Moment From the 1970s Explored in New Film

A new Netflix film will investigate one of the most iconic moments in nature documentary history: when a baby gorilla called Pablo decided to lie across David Attenborough.

Attenborough was in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park in 1976 filming Life on Earth, aired by the BBC in the U.K. and PBS in the U.S. In what is widely considered the most memorable moment from the hit series, Attenborough bravely walked into the midst of a family of gorillas, who accepted him in and, for a brief moment, treated him as one of their own. Attenborough was supposed to talk about the dexterity of gorillas while the family was situated in the background, but the unexpected and unscripted moment gave the filmmakers and the audience something that would live with them forever.

“The baby gorilla started taking off my shoes,” Attenborough later said of the encounter. “Well, you can’t talk about the opposable thumb and the importance in primate evolution of the grip if somebody is taking off your shoes, particularly if that somebody is two baby gorillas.”

The Netflix show is titled A Gorilla Story and will release globally on April 17. The show is part of Attenborough’s centenary celebrations; the British naturalist turns 100 next month.

“I’ve worked with David Attenborough for my whole career and obviously the most famous sequence in the whole of wildlife filmmaking is David with Pablo the gorilla in Life on Earth, his first series,” Alastair Fothergill, a producer on the Netflix film and executive director at Silverback Films, tells the BBC. “That encounter changed how the world saw gorillas.”

The film is narrated by Attenborough and will tell the story of what happened to the baby Rwandan mountain gorilla Pablo, and the rest of the gorillas at the Volcanoes National Park.

“Weaving together contemporary and archival footage of the gorilla group and narrated by Attenborough — including excerpts from his 1978 journals — A Gorilla Story is packed with extraordinary gorilla behavior never filmed before,” the doc’s description says.

The film is directed by Oscar winner James Reed (My Octopus Teacher) and produced by the Emmy-winning, veteran nature documentarian Alastair Fothergill (Life on Our Planet) and Silverback Films.