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‘Ignited’ burns down gender shroud of forest fires
An animated short movie based on research from traditional communities in Central Kalimantan highlights concerns from women, who are often left out of public discourse on wildfires.
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A scene from Ignited shows a woman taking meal packages for men volunteering for Masyarakat Peduli Api (Fire Awareness Community), who help put out the wildfires in Central Kalimantan. The animated short movie highlights concerns of local communities in the province, especially women, about the wildfires that devastate their villages and surrounding forests. (Courtesy of Fire Play/-)
T
he movie opens with a scene at a dining table at a house in a local community in Central Kalimantan, where men of three generations complain together about how difficult it is for them to farm because of wildfires, and how they are often blamed for burning land to prepare it for farming, despite using a controlled fire method learned from their ancestors.
But the dining table scene was just an intro for Ignited, before the movie shifted to its main stage: a house kitchen filled with women who aired their own grievances about the wildfires around them.
One woman loathed the low funding for the fire volunteers that take a long time to arrive. Another complained that her husband returned from the field with dirty laundry rather than money. Almost all of them were coughing from exposure to smoke, relying only on lime juice to suppress their ailments.
The gender concerns regarding wildfire mitigation are the central theme of Ignited, a short animation produced as part of ethnographic research on how local communities in Central Kalimantan struggle to fight the wildfires around them while enduring the impacts on their lives and livelihoods.
Read also: Regions brace for wildfire, haze as dry season peaks
Central Kalimantan is one of the most fire-prone regions in the country, with more than 1 million hectares burned in 2015, 2019 and 2023, the years when Indonesia saw great wildfires triggered by the El Niño climate phenomenon.
But relatively hidden behind these statistics were stories about how people, especially women, cope with the impacts from the fires that destroy their lands, livelihoods and health.
