34 minutes, HD video, 2026
‘We, like all people, want to live and we want to be free’. In a dispatch from the back-room of a museum, the ghost of a long-dead orangutan returns to narrate early 20th century propaganda films documenting Sumatra’s plantations. She recounts acts of resistance of those, human and non-human, who came before and after her. A Person of the Forest is a ghost story of the colonial past summoned to disturb the present.
Commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum, the Netherlands, this film work opened as part of the group exhibition Eye(s) Open – New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage, April – September 2026.
Writer / director / editor Miranda Pennell
Composer Simon Fisher Turner
Made with support from Eye Filmmuseum, the Netherlands
“Watching Pennell’s film, I found myself overcome by grief; how many worlds have ended before, under the same colonial, genocidal drive that continues to shape our present? In this film, the end never finishes beginning.”
Lilly Markaki, Open City Texts 2026
“One of the most striking contributions came from the London-based artist and filmmaker Miranda Pennell. She repurposes propaganda films about a plantation in Sumatra into a haunting indictment of colonial exploitation. One could even call it haunted, because Pennell gives the video an unexpected narrator.
(…) But Pennell goes a step further. New footage shot in the zoological museum’s archives (an eerie repository of dead animals) serves as a visual echo of the historical images of the transport ship’s crowded cargo hold. Her edit unfolds almost like a poem or a song: certain observations return like a recurring refrain. Yet the film’s most powerful and inventive element is its performative voice-over. Pennell lends her own voice to the dead orangutan, giving added weight to its non-human point of view. That ghostly narration gives the film not only a non-anthropocentric perspective, but also a precolonial one: the voice of nature before it was silenced by colonisation.”
Film Scalpel 2026
“It is, among other things, this attention to the presence of animals in the archive that makes the exhibition innovative. Miranda Pennell’s *A Person of the Forest* addresses the deforestation of Sumatra on behalf of the spirit of an orangutan (…)
Pennell gives a voice to those who have gone unheard for centuries and highlights the more-than-human aspect of colonialism. It was not only the fate of humans that was radically altered; ecosystems and animal habitats were also ground up in the machinery of “discovery” and commerce. Pennell points out that the rigorous scientific system of categorizing, documenting, and shipping specimens to European research institutions relies on the same mechanism as the film archive. The great ape—the “forest person” who constantly challenges the divide between human and animal through the use of tools, such as the hammer on the ship—stands ready to escape this mechanism of divide and rule”
Tessel Janse in Metropolis, June 8th 2026, ‘The camera is not neutral – Artists present fresh perspectives on the colonial archive in *Eye(s) Open*‘ (translated from Dutch using an app)
