U.S. Secret Service was at the Tribeca Film Festival Hub for more than just Malia Obama this week. On Saturday, April 22, Hillary Clinton was in the house as well.

Clinton was on-hand as a surprise guest and panelist for the premiere of The Protectors: Walk in the Ranger’s Shoes, a new virtual reality short film from director Kathryn Bigelow and VR creator Imraan Ismail. The eight-minute film highlights the African elephants’ race toward extinction at the hands of ivory-seeking poachers, interviewing a group of Garamba National Park rangers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As they discuss the trials of their profession, they bushwhack their way through 10-foot grasses and cruise by jeep and boat in an attempt to patrol this vast territory.

On this Earth Day 2017—when thousands marched in our nation’s major cities on behalf of science— “part of science is understanding the intricate relationships that we share with all those on this planet, and particularly large mammals like elephants, who have a role to play both in reality and in our imaginations,” said Clinton. She noted the film as “remarkable” for the way it “brings to reality what we’re up against.”

This is particularly stark in the film's final sequence, when the small group of rangers comes to a clearing in the grass to find an elephant corpse, tusks sawed off and face mutilated, rotting away in the African sun. “When I find a dead elephant, I feel like they have killed my child,” one ranger says.

Thanks to Bigelow and Ismail’s work (and their 360-degree camera technology), this elephant lays larger-than-life, seemingly within reach. It’s as close to a literally transporting experience as film can achieve. From this immersive perspective, you can understand when the ranger calls this helpless animal “my child”—it’s the kind of searing image that makes your heart hurt.

It’s estimated that each day, approximately 100 elephants are killed by poachers, and that in 2016, there were more elephants being killed than were being born. Today, there are an estimated 400,000 elephants left, and the U.S. stands as the second largest importer of illegal ivory. At their current death rate, elephants may well be extinct within the next decade. “If conservation isn’t a part of our daily life, we’ll look back and your children, your grandchildren, will only ever experience an elephant in a photographic book,” Bigelow said, speaking exclusively with Vanity Fair prior to Saturday’s event. “The risk is to do nothing…. Time is the enemy on every front.”

The Protectors is a fine piece of conservation media—the kind of work that makes an audience want to take action. Clinton described Bigelow and Ismail’s film as a necessary portal—“a portal that people can go into and think about,” she said. “There is a lot that can be done: Stop the killing, stop the trafficking, and stop the demand. And part of that is protecting these rangers, who are up against some of the most ruthless killers anywhere on the planet right now, and doing the very best they can.”

Clinton, Ismail, and Bigelow—along with fellow panelists Rachel Webber (from National Geographic) and Andrea Heydlauff (of African Parks)—all urged audiences to consider donating to outfitaranger.org and other African Parks conservation initiatives. Bigelow, who also explored African elephant poaching in the 2014 animated short Last Days, said that the apparent “intersection between poaching and terrorism” led her to The Protectors. There are real dangers in the field of “insects, animals, and also the poachers who are very well armed,” Bigelow told the sold-out audience. “It’s no joke out there.” Just last week, for instance, two poachers lost their lives while on duty, leaving behind two wives and a total of 11 children.