Paper short abstract:

A Team of collaborators created a fiction film in the Penan forest of Sarawak, Malaysia. In 'our age of emergency,' the exploration of speculative fiction in climate futures offers a unique insight into spatial time as an ecological epistemology named 'hope'. A response ( prophesy )

Paper long abstract:

What are the visuals that you can't un-see?

What are the sounds that you can't un-hear?

What are the stories that you can't forget, that will make you stop cutting down the forests?

In 2016 in the post-logged secondary forests of Sarawak, Malaysia, a team of over 200 hundred collaborators (indigenous & outsiders) created a fiction film of a virus outbreak that takes over the world, and the search for the medicine plant to save humanity.

The film sensorially explores the relationship between the 'stories we tell' and the everyday realities of climate-changed lives, through the adaptation of a discarded film script from Universal Studios, developed as a tool in attempt to halt the deforestation. However what transpired were the more reflexive questions of 'making a fiction film' as an ethnographic method — scrutinising practises of speculative fiction and contingent futures in conflict with a Penan epistemology, characterised with a 'spatial time'.

This paper reflexively posits the production and the modes of collaboration within the context of Climate Futures, and in doing so reveals intrinsic insights of non-linear & non-cyclical 'Penan sense of time', further contextualised for its ecological comprehension.

Highlighting the aspects that were ethically precarious, this paper attempts to situate the film production in the years that followed, and in doing so gestures to the haunting nature of future fictions and/as 'prophesy'.

A response.