5/5

Review by Michele E. Hawkins.

Unlikely though it seems for orphaned orangutans of Borneo and orphaned elephant calves in Africa to have anything in common, they do: both owe an enormous debt to extraordinary women.

In 1971, 25-year-old Dr Biruté Galdikas moved into the Tanjung Puting Reserve, in Indonesian Borneo, where she set up Camp Leakey and began to study wild orangutans. Over fifty years, this two-hut facility, transformed into a care centre and quarantine facility, has sheltered hundreds of displaced orangutans, including orphans rescued from the illegal pet trade.

But rescuing an orphaned baby orangutan is just the beginning. Bringing these vulnerable infants through to independent adulthood in the wild takes enormous skill, knowledge, understanding, and love and dedication — including sleeping with them, as they won’t thrive without the round-the-clock physical contact they would have had with their mothers.

Also in 1971, but in Kenya, Dame Daphne Sheldrick was continuing the work she had embarked on in 1937 when, at three years of age, she cared for her first wild orphaned animal, a duiker antelope. Her love for wild animals and her conviction that they deserved to live free never wavered, and in 1953 she and her husband David began taking in orphaned animals of many species, including extremely traumatised elephant calves needing milk. Unfortunately, no available milk formulas adequately substituted for elephant milk, and the babies succumbed. Daphne eventually developed her own formula, which proved a successful substitute for elephant milk; the orphans began to thrive.

But young elephants, like baby orangutans, require round-the-clock care, including sleeping with them, before they can be successfully released to live with wild herds.

For Biruté Galdikas, what began as a scientific study of wild orangutans became a much greater enterprise of rescue and rehabilitation, conservation, advocacy, and prudent return to the wild of many orangutans, including one male who, forty years after his release back into the wild, was the dominant male in his area of rainforest. In Kenya, hundreds of elephants who have been saved and returned to the wild have Daphne Sheldrick to thank for her decades of tireless commitment to them.

The work of both Galdikas and Sheldrick in saving and returning to their wild natural environments complex, highly intelligent mammals continues to this day.

In its 3D printing, Born to Be Wild offers footage — a baby orangutan so tantalisingly close that it seems possible to reach out and take him in your arms; an elephant’s trunk questing so close to your face that you draw back — whose lifelike intimacy enhances our sense of connection with these animals. That intimacy and the dedication of these teams of human foster parents inspire the realisation that anything’s possible when we give our hearts, minds, and spirits free rein to care for other inhabitants of our planet.

Screening at Dendy IMAX .