Deramakot Forest Reserve in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, has been managed for reduced-impact logging since the 1990s and has held FSC certification continuously since 1997, longer than any other tropical rainforest. One main road with different concession roads carries all of its traffic: harvest vehicles, ranger patrols, research teams and the nightly wildlife safari.
Night Dental at Deramakot takes the dental examination as its model. In the chair, the body is held in exposure: light enters a narrow cavity, tools search through partial visibility, waiting stretches, and the patient cannot know what is being seen with partial sensation. The night safari repeats this procedure in the forest. Torch beams work as examination lights, and animals are the findings that rarely appear. The tourist sits through it in the patient's position, seeing conducted by another's light.
Footage was shot in March 2026 across Deramakot, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Weston mangrove, in collaboration mainly with field guides Kol and Theodore, whose knowledge structures the work. The fieldwork established the facts on which the film is built. When tourists occupy the road, ranger patrols are reduced; a busy road deters hunters, and the safari performs surveillance as a side function of leisure. After each harvest, rain gathers in the rutted roads, the puddles attract more frogs, and leopard cats come out to hunt them. Elephants use the same roads to keep their footing on the steep terrain. At the roadside, abandoned excavators stand overgrown, tagged as government property so that auditors can record them as maintained. When fallen trees blocked the route, the guide, driver and tourists cleared them together. Felled trunks travel by cable between standing trees so that nothing crashes through the understorey, while villagers along the Kinabatangan collect dipterocarp seedlings for the nurseries that replant each compartment. In this forest, every activity, including looking, has been folded into the management plan.
The film is built from three kinds of footage. Handheld torchlight records the tourist's view: guides pointing, lights scanning, animals withdrawing. Infrared turns the camera back toward human faces under the pressure of being watched. Microscope imagery enters burnt wood, fungal decay and insect traces, an interior no examination reaches. The imaging technologies of the work are also its subject. Deramakot is seen through many instruments: researchers arrive with their own optics, auditors with their checklists, guides with an empirical eye trained over years. The film restricts itself to the ordinary visitor's kit. The microscope is a children's digital microscope, the infrared is a low-cost night-viewing device, and the torchlight is the safari's own.
