04/12/2021
Crouching Tigers, Hidden Cameras
TO make her Malayan tiger documentary, film producer Lara Ariffin had to watch camera footage of a leaf moving in a jungle.
Really.
The fluttering foliage triggered a camera trap, one of many mounted by the Wildlife and National Parks Department (Perhilitan) and conservation groups such as Pelindung in over 400 locations in Taman Negara as part of the National Tiger Survey.
"All this footage of this leaf," she groans. "But you’re not sure because there might be a tiger, right? So you still end up having to go through all the footage," she reminisces with a laugh.
She, her husband, director Harun Rahman, and their small crew didn’t just have to stake out the deep wilds of Taman Negara to try and catch an image of a Malayan tiger on camera, they also had to wade through a lot – “terabytes” is Harun’s word – of images captured on camera traps to get their perfect shots of the elusive jungle cat.
"We were extremely frustrated as we believed that this was not only an important story for Malaysians but for the world,” the couple has said in a statement accompanying the release of the documentary on the National Geographic Channel recently.
In the meantime, the husband and wife team got busy with other projects, producing and directing other award-winning films such as Among the Great Apes with Michelle Yeoh (2009), the history documentary Rising Sun Over Malaya (2013) and anti-poaching flick On Borrowed Time (2011).
"We did a whole series of films which kept us in touch with the subject matter,” recalls Lara, 54.
When the couple finally received a small grant from the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (better known by its Malay acronym, Finas) in 2018 for the project, they went ahead.
Only to run into another major obstacle....
