A few hundred mountain gorillas survive in the Virunga range, a chain of volcanic peaks straddling Rwanda, and this film follows their daily lives at close range. The camera stays with family groups long enough to catch what actually happens inside them: young gorillas wrestling and testing boundaries, mothers grooming infants, and a dominant silverback settling disputes or standing watch over the group. Much of the footage reads as observational rather than narrated event, letting behavior carry the story instead of commentary. The film also tracks the threats these groups face, chiefly poaching and the shrinking of habitat as human activity presses into the mountains, and shows conservationists and local communities working to keep both the animals and the land intact. The connection between the two is treated as direct rather than abstract: the gorillas cannot survive if the volcanic forest around them keeps eroding, and the forest's condition is itself shaped by the people living at its edges. What emerges is a portrait of an animal population small enough that individual family groups, and individual silverbacks, actually matter to its survival.