Wildlife filmmakers in the Borneo rainforest: A whole day for a minute of film

Shooting for a whole day, just for a minute in a film - if you're lucky. Making a wildlife film is arduous. Thoralf Grospitz and Jens Westphalen go where hardly any people live - but where there are many wild animals. The two have been working as wildlife filmmakers for 30 years and have traveled to the rainforest of Borneo to get orangutans, gibbons and pygmy elephants in front of the camera.

What does it take to make a really good nature film? ZEIT reporter Dagny Lüdemann accompanied the two of them for six weeks and talks to podcast host Linda Fischer about days in bat caves and weeks between rainforest and hostile plantations on the third largest island in the world.

In his column, Christoph Drösser examines the question of how these special elephants got to Borneo.

Show notes

The film Orangutans – As Close as Never by Thoralf Grospitz and Jens Westphalen is available in the ARD media library.

The making of the film How to film orangutans.

In the podcast, Jens Westphalen describes a moment during an earlier shoot that was particularly close to him. Here he can be seen in the documentary Elephants up close.