Producer's Diary

Sikundur, goodbyes, and thank you.

The last day, and it started with a boat ride deep into Sikundur. The forest here was previously logged and then left to recover from the 1970s onwards. Left alone, it has grown back tall, green and full of life, living proof of how a forest heals when it is given the chance.

At Aras Napal there is a rescue centre, with gibbons, orangutans and sun bears in its care, all waiting for a forest to go back to. After a week of seeing orangutans free in the canopy, standing in front of one behind bars is a different feeling entirely, and a reminder of what the work out here is for.

Then it was goodbye to Ian Singleton. Thank you so much for showing us the forests and sharing great stories and jokes along the way!

To Diana, CEO of YEL, who believed in this film from the very beginning. To Idris, Togar and Herman, who guided us through the forest and kept us safe. To Dimas, Gilbert, Arista, Bobbi, Ichwan and Hasma, and the teams at YEL, SOCP and YPSIM, who opened doors before we had even arrived. To the drivers, the boatmen, the lodge staff, and everyone who carried, pointed, waited and laughed with us: terima kasih! You are part of this story already.

- Elaine

Across the river at Tangkahan.

This morning we crossed the river at Tangkahan and entered the forest by first light, boots full of mud, shirt soaked through with sweat and counting leech bites along the way.

We came out in a natural amphitheatre some time later. Two streams meet in the middle of it, and the forest closes in on every side like the walls of a room. The canopy opens above the centre, and the light comes down in one wide beam, straight onto the ground in the middle. Is this our piano spot?

Moments later, an elephant moved through the jungle right beside us, and then something you almost never see at Tangkahan: a wild adult male orangutan, full cheek pads, and in no mood for visitors. He hissed, he threw branches, and he made it very clear whose forest it was. We did not argue!

After the trek we all relaxed in the cool river, then swam upstream to a hidden spot where warm sulphur water wells up into a small inlet, a natural hot spring in the middle of the forest.

Then we were on the road again, towards Besitang, and for miles and miles and miles the road ran through plantation. We arrived in the dark. Tomorrow, the boat.

- Elaine

At Batu Rongring there is a cotton tree about 300 years old, standing in a pocket of old forest, said to be one of the biggest trees in Sumatra. It is so enormous we could barely fit it into one photo!

In the evening Ian gave us a slideshow presentation. Twenty-five years of this work: orangutans rescued from cages and backyards, the quarantine centre where they are nursed back and taught to be orangutans again, and the part that moved me most, two entirely new wild populations, in Jantho in Aceh and in Jambi, built one released orangutan at a time, about two hundred released into each, with babies now born in the wild. He calls them the backup populations, an insurance policy in case the forest they came from is ever gone. What one determined person and a small team can do for a species is awe-inspiring.

Tomorrow we go across the river into the Tangkahan forest, and I cannot wait.

- Elaine

Ian has spent more of his life with Sumatran orangutans than almost anyone alive, and having him walk the forest with us was kind of surreal.

The forest gave us two more orangutans this morning, high up in the canopy, and we watched them for as long as they would let us!!

We walked a long way behind the lodge and found more of what we came for: little clearings under big trees, a place by the river that looks like a tiny round stage, open ground where the light falls just so.

In the afternoon the rain came and we went tubing on the Landak River anyway!! Soaked, laughing, bouncing between the rocks, with the forest steaming on both banks. By late afternoon the rain had stopped, and the mist came up through the trees until the whole valley went soft and white.

- Elaine

Dawn in the forest, and our first wild orangutan.

Up at five and into the forest while it was still dark! Idris, our guide for the next two days, led the way, and by the time the sun was coming through the trees, birds and gibbons had started their morning songs. If you have never heard gibbons at dawn, it is the loudest, happiest sound in the forest, and it goes on for ages. Then Thomas's leaf monkeys, with their funny punk hairstyles, close enough to see them properly.

We spent the morning looking at the forest with a producer's eye, which is a strange way to walk through somewhere this beautiful. We are looking for places where the light comes through, where there is enough open ground, where the river is loud and where it is not.

In the afternoon we rode motorcycles to two places near the road, one deep in a rubber plantation, one a high clearing of ferns with the mountains far away and forest filling the valleys below. And then, on the way to the Bat Cave, the moment of the day. An orangutan, in the rubber trees by the road. Ian's first wild orangutan, and mine!! We were so excited we forgot about the Bat Cave entirely and followed it for over an hour, as quietly as two very excited people can.

Dinner with Ian Singleton and his wife Ajeng, and we briefly met Ipuh, the snake man of Bukit Lawang, who catches snakes to entertain tourists and once rescued people stuck in a tunnel while tubing.

Day one in Bukit Lawang, and we already have more than we hoped for!!

- Elaine

A morning with the YPSIM foundation in Medan.

This morning we visited YPSIM, Yayasan Perguruan Sultan Iskandar Muda, on the edge of Medan. Dr Sofyan Tan founded it in 1987, and today children of many faiths and backgrounds learn side by side there, from kindergarten all the way to university. Dr Tan also dreamed up the Orangutan Haven together with Regina Frey and Ian Singleton, so after yesterday it felt like exactly the right place to come next!

They gave us a two-hour tour of the whole school: a little music room, a photo studio and an editing room, and on the university side a library, a podcast room and a beautiful auditorium. I could already picture a screening in there!

We talked about what we might do together one day, a recital with the students, or Hillary playing for them once we have a piano, and how lovely it would be to come back and screen the film for the students when it is finished. A film like this is only worth making if it reaches young people, and here are the next generation of Indonesia's conservation leaders. Nothing is decided, but everyone was so open and so kind. Thank you Erisda, Renita, Kamalia and Hardiansyah!

In the afternoon we set off for Bukit Lawang. Tomorrow, the forest at last!

- Elaine

Meeting Dr Ian Singleton, the Haven's residents and the forest school.

Today we met Dr Ian Singleton, who has spent more than twenty-five years caring for Sumatra's orangutans and helped describe a whole new species, the Tapanuli orangutan, in 2017. We got to the Orangutan Haven after dawn, and thin gold light was coming through the bamboo, the bamboo bridge was glowing, and it was completely quiet except for the orangutans waking up. It felt like stepping into another world. For Ian Mun and me it was the first time we had ever seen orangutans anywhere outside a zoo.

The Haven itself is a marvel: water fed by gravity, most of the orangutans' food grown on site, and amazing bamboo architecture, including the long bamboo bridge Gilbert helped build. The orangutans who live at the Haven can never go back to the forest, and every one of them has a story. Leuser is blind, shot 62 times with an air rifle, and yet when he was first let out onto his island he was so happy there that he would not go back inside for six weeks. Krismon spent 19 years in a cage so small that his rescuers had to cut the bars apart around him. Fahzren grew up riding bicycles in animal shows and has no fear of people, so the wild would never be safe for him. Lewis is blind too, shot by farmers. And Dek Nong told us exactly what she thought of us by shaking her pole as hard as she could! After everything that has happened to them, they are still so full of spirit.

Then on to the forest school at Batu Mbelin, where young orphaned orangutans learn everything their mothers should have taught them: how to climb, how to find food, how to build a nest. Their teachers are people. Watching a keeper gently guide a baby up into the trees was one of the most moving things I have ever seen. The school was wiped out by a landslide in November 2024, and the team has nearly rebuilt all of it.

A huge thank you to Dimas, Gilbert, Arista and Ichwan for looking after us all day. What a start!!

- Elaine

What it would take to bring a grand piano to the rainforest.

In Medan, and we started with the biggest question of all: how do you take a grand piano into a rainforest?!

We went to see the managing director of a piano shop in Medan to talk it through. Which pianos are built light enough to be carried by hand, up and down muddy slopes? How do you keep one stable and in tune when the air is this humid, and how often would it need a tuner? We came away with lots of answers, even more questions, and a very long list.

In the evening Ian and I held our first production meeting of the trip and talked about the film until late: the music, the sounds of the forest, the way we want it to look and feel. Nothing is settled, but I went to bed feeling it can be done. Tomorrow, the orangutans!

- Elaine

Final preparations before nine days in North Sumatra.

Three days until we fly, and I can hardly sit still!

It has been two years since I first had the idea for Hands Like Ours, and I am so lucky to be making it with my co-director, Ian Mun. Since August we have been working closely with our partners in Indonesia on every detail of the trip, and every reply has been so warm and so efficient that I already feel we are going to people who want this film as much as we do.

The plan: a briefing with YEL, Yayasan Ekosistem Lestari, in Medan, then the Orangutan Haven and the forest school, where rescued young orangutans learn to be orangutans again. After that, the forest.

Until now, the only orangutans Ian and I have ever seen were at the zoo in Singapore. Before we write a single page of this film, we need to see them in Sumatra, and meet the people who have given their lives to them. I cannot wait!!

- Elaine