Picture a rhinoceros in a rainforest. Add in orangutans swinging above, and elephants and tigers prowling below. There is only one place on our planet you could be — the Leuser Ecosystem in Sumatra, Indonesia.
The Leuser Ecosystem is the last place on Earth where critically endangered orangutans, rhinos, elephants, and tigers still share the same rainforest. Its ancient forests and deep peatlands store vast amounts of carbon. Its rivers provide water for millions of people. And for decades, it has been a fiercely contested landscape — a place where extraordinary biodiversity collides with powerful corporate extractive industries.
For longtime followers of Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Leuser is a familiar name. For more than a decade, RAN and our Indonesian partners have worked to expose rainforest destruction, trace palm oil supply chains, hold corporations accountable, and support efforts to protect this globally significant ecosystem.
Now, that story is reaching new audiences.
After nearly nine years in production, a new documentary from OPS Productions, has finally premiered at the Dancing with Films Festival in Hollywood, CA. The film, The Last Place on Earth, has moved audiences and won the coveted Grand Jury Prize.
The film features stunning footage and compelling stories of orangutans and other threatened wildlife. But the story primarily follows the incredible people on the frontlines of the fight for the Leuser Ecosystem — conservationists, investigators, journalists, and community leaders who have dedicated years of their lives to protecting one of the most important rainforest landscapes left on Earth.
When RAN first began campaigning to protect the Leuser Ecosystem, few consumers understood how products sold in stores around the world could be connected to the destruction of critical rainforest habitat in Indonesia. RAN and our partners and allies around the world have worked hard to share the story of this epic landscape — and this film offers the best chance yet for large, new audiences to get to know this region. More importantly, new audiences can learn how they can help protect this critical region.
Together with local partners, grassroots activists, investors, and allied organizations, RAN has pushed major palm oil traders, manufacturers, and consumer brands to adopt stronger policies against deforestation and human rights abuses. Investigations exposed links between global supply chains and forest destruction. This sort of public pressure has helped make rainforest protection a business issue that companies could no longer ignore.
We celebrate the progress made over the last decade, and the innovative, landscape-scale, multistakeholder initiative called the Aceh Sustainable Palm Oil Working Group. This effort has brought together big global brands, local farmers groups, regional government representatives and civil society to seek long term solutions to the deforestation crisis.
But the fight for the future of the Leuser Ecosystem is far from over. The Leuser continues to face threats from illegal deforestation, infrastructure development, and extractive industries. The gains that have been made remain fragile. Protecting this landscape will require continued commitment from governments, companies, civil society organizations, and the communities that call the region home.
At a moment when environmental news often focuses on setbacks, The Last Place on Earth offers something different. It shows what sustained commitment looks like. It shows how change often happens — not through a single breakthrough, but through years of persistence, collaboration, and hard-won progress.
For many of us at RAN, watching this story unfold on screen is both moving and deeply personal. Many of the people, places, and struggles depicted in the film have shaped our work for years. We’ve celebrated important victories. We’ve experienced painful, frustrating losses. And we’ve learned that protecting a landscape as significant as the Leuser requires patience, partnership, and a willingness to keep going even when success is far from certain.
The title of the film refers to a place unlike any other on Earth. But one of the lessons I took from it is that places like the Leuser are not protected just because they are extraordinary. They are protected because passionate people decide to dedicate years of their lives in an effort to save them.
We hope you’ll join us in celebrating the premiere of The Last Place on Earth and in reflecting on the work that continues long after the credits roll. For now, the film will be showing in theaters at film festivals around the country and soon, across the world. The hope is that a global distributor can be secured so that everyone will soon have streaming access to view the film at home.
Over the past decade, the Leuser Ecosystem has emerged as a laboratory of landscape-scale conservation innovation as well as a litmus test for corporate commitments to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains. While the Leuser itself is immensely important, the lessons learned and the new standards set in this landscape offer a template that has implications for the future of other critical forest regions and Indigenous communities across the world. Luckily, this is a future that is still being written.