ScreenWize

For a country like Indonesia, with close to 50 million people living in poverty, world demand for crops like palm oil mean a potentially lucrative source of income and livelihood for many, however it also means that areas of forest the size of Denmark are cleared in Indonesia every year to make way for plantations. Most people farming these areas have limited access to modern tools, and so these forests are usually cleared by fire, producing a blanket of smoke that makes Indonesia the third largest contributor to atmospheric carbon, and global warming.

Brisbane-based filmmaker Cathy Henkel looks at this issue through the journey of Dorjee Sun, a remarkable young Australian, one of those overachievers who hope to save the world and may end up doing just that. The Burning Season is the story of his journeys around the world chasing investors for a carbon trading scheme for Aceh, Borneo and Sumatra. There is one moment in the film when Dorjee lands a carbon trading deal potentially worth millions of dollars, and the capitalist in him comes out. It’s easy to forget that people trying to save the world also need to make a living, and preferably a nice one at that. It is an interesting moment in the film and will provoke different reactions in every viewer, but it does demonstrate that the filmmakers were working on a rounded film and not a simple piece of pro-conservation propaganda.

It does work in that way as well – cinematographers Leonard Retel Helmrich and Ismail Fahmi Lubis do a wonderful job capturing the beauty of the Indonesian forests, and their work is equally mesmerising as they capture environments in crisis, and both the playtime and the desperate wanderings of the orang-utans displaced by deforestation. Henkel teases out the layered issues behind carbon trading and the complexity of and mistrust behind First World vs Third World negotiations, and Dorjee’s travels frame her story well, and give them a champion we comfortable First-Worlders can relate to.

Contrasting Dorjee’s story is that of subsistence farmer Achmadi and wildlife carer Lone Droscher-Nielsen, who fight on the frontline of this emotive issue, though Henkel’s film is optimistic where it might have easily been maudlin. Hugh Jackman’s narration adds a touch of star quality to the production, while an inventive animated take on traditional Balinese shadow puppets used for titles give this doco a crisp style.

CK
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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon