“For us, ivory is worthless unless it is on our elephants,” says Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta in a televised statement, shortly before several vast hauls of severed elephant tusks — ornately piled like sacred shrines — is ceremoniously set ablaze. It’s a confiscated collection that, Kenyatta tells his audience, is worth $150 million, literally going up in smoke.

On the one hand, it’s a defiant and honorable gesture of principle, a boldly symbolic warning to illegal poachers that no blood money is good money; to unnamed, hard-up ivory trader “X,” watching the broadcast stony-faced from his squalid, impoverished shanty settlement, the long view isn’t quite so apparent. It’s a complex scene of moral whiplash that encapsulates the conflicting consciences driving “When Lambs Become Lions”:

Arriving on U.S. screens long after its debut at last year’s Tribeca fest, “When Lions Become Lambs” has racked up a long
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