In what amounts to a follow-up to the 1989 documentary Tong Tana, filmmakers Erik Pauser and Dylan Williams continue a story of perfidy and environmental devastation in the Malaysian Borneo rainforests. The previous film's hero, Bruno Manser, a Swiss activist dedicated to saving the old-growth forests from uncontrolled logging and corporate natural-resource exploitation, disappeared in the Sarawak jungle in 2000, almost certainly murdered. His native partner-in-activism, Mutang Urud, lives in exile in Canada, and Borneo's land continues to be plundered by multinationals, which also personally enriches the vast private fortune of longtime Chief Minister of the State Abdul Taib Mahmud, a champion of "modernization." But faraway London-based grassroots activists, using the Internet and radio, bombard the people of Borneo with news and messages of resistance, and even Mahmud's old American business partner turns informer. Eventually, the good-guy Davids triumph over the seeming Goliath of a dictator-for-life and powerful financial interests in this inspiring story of "people power" fueling an eco-victory and non-violently undermining a dirty regime. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)
The Borneo Case
(2017) 78 min. DVD: $50 ($125 w/PPR): public libraries; $295 w/PPR: colleges & universities. DRA. Collective Eye Films. Closed captioned. Volume 34, Issue 1
The Borneo Case
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