Meet the teenage filmmaker preserving his elders’ wisdom to save Borneo’s forests

In the space of 40 years, the island of Borneo has lost nearly half of its rainforests. But amid rampant environmental destruction, one village is a haven. Sungai Utik is named after the crystal clear river that flows through it. Here, forests stand tall and the waters run clean, unimpeded by deforestation and pollution. Safeguarded by the Dayak Iban people for over 100 years, outsiders would travel to the region to understand their way of life and relationship with the land. As a young boy, Kynan Tegar watched this with great interest. “I saw people that came to our village to take pictures, make films, to tell our story of how we were able to protect it,” he says. “I thought, why aren’t we telling our stories through our own perspective?” When his father gifted him a camera and asked him to record one of the village rituals, it set Tegar on a path to becoming a storyteller and activist. Today, the teenager is documenting his community’s culture in order to preserve Indonesia’s forests.

“I’m capturing stories in the indigenous perspective so that we are the ones to tell our own stories, the stories that need to be heard,” Tegar says. Since the age of 13, he has taught himself how to film and create videos through trial, error, and YouTube tutorials. Tegar is now a prolific filmmaker, producing documentaries focusing on his community’s traditional rituals, methods of farming, and their struggle for legal recognition. After a decades-long fight, the people of Sungai Utik have been officially granted nearly 10 000 hectares of forest to manage and conserve. “For us, the forest and our culture is intrinsically linked,” Tegar says. “If we lose our forests the culture will be lost too.” Nature is the Dayak Iban’s source of sustenance and life, but as younger people move out of the village, its future depends on elders passing down their knowledge to youth.

Tegar’s most recent documentary focuses on the village’s cultural house, a space for the community to convene and share their wisdom and values. “My film is about the reconstruction of our customary house, the long house, and what it meant for the community, their hope it will become a place of learning, of cultural transmission to the younger generation,” he explains. From the gathering of pillars to the building process and rituals involved, Tegar’s film documents the construction for others to replicate. It has become a source of pride and symbol of hope that the people of Sungai Utik will persist in their efforts to defend their home. “Us, the younger generations, we are the ones that have the responsibility to protect our territory, to preserve our culture, to learn it, to embrace it, and for us to be the ones to pass it on,” Tegar says. “We should be the ones to do that, because if not us, then who?”

Footage and images by Kynan Tegar were used in the creation of this film.