The Burning Season

The Burning Season (2008)

Can carbon-trading save the Indonesian rainforests?

Dorjee Sun, a young Australian Entrepreneur, believes there's money to be made from protecting rainforests in Indonesia, saving the orangutan from extinction and making a real impact on climate change. Armed with a laptop and a backpack, he sets out across the globe to find investors in his carbon trading scheme. It is a battle against time. Achmadi, the palm oil farmer is ready to set fire to his land to plant more palm oil, and Lone's orangutan centre has reached crisis point with over 600 orangutans rescued from the fires. The Burning Season is an eco-thriller about a young man not afraid to confront the biggest challenge of our time.

Date of release
2008-08-02
TMDB
6.8 / 10 (4)
Runtime
1h 29m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Cathy Henkel

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: A$19.3K

The Burning Season is a documentary about the burning of rainforests in Indonesia which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008. The main characters featured in the film are: Dorjee Sun from Australia; Achmadi, a small-scale palm oil farmer from Jambi province in Indonesia; and Lone Drøscher Nielsen, a Danish conservationist based in Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Production

The film was updated in 2009 with a new ending which included the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis and a meeting with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The film had a theatrical release in Australia and a digital release in the USA through FilmBuff. The DVD remains widely used in the education sector.

The production attracted philanthropic support through the Documentary Australia Foundation, including from an unnamed Melbourne family trust. Broadcast partners were ABC, BBC and CBC with National Geographic as distributor. Financial support was also provided by the Film Finance Corporation Australia, the NSW Film and TV Office and the Australian Film Commission. A total production budget of $755,529 was raised.

While Roger Graef is credited as the film's Executive Producer on the production's website, the post-roll credits on the Australian DVD release list him more specifically as the Executive Producer of the BBC version of the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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