In the tradition of the old newsreel houses with Pathé's rattling projectors and the flicker of gaslit picture halls; these films are shot and cut as if pulled straight from the archive. Black and white. The camera unsteady, as a man's hand would be, following the story rather than staging it. Frames catch and blur. The reel clicks and hisses between cuts. Nothing is smoothed over for modern eyes.

Each film below is a dispatch. It is a fragment of a larger expedition, developed and screened much as it might have been a century ago.

The British North Borneo Collection

RUBBER: THE TREE THAT BUILT A WORLD

A short moving picture styled as a 1912 Pathé newsreel, following the Ranjang Estate in Tuaran, British North Borneo: one of the last plantations founded under a chartered company's licence.

Through the eyes of three men who call the estate home, and the Tamil, Chinese and Dayak workers whose labour keeps it running, the film traces rubber's journey from seedling to shipment: the nursery, the tapping and smoking of latex, the processing sheds, and the wharf at Jesselton where the crop meets the wider world.

Made as a companion piece to The Kenyalang Series, Books 2 and 3 (The Heart of Borneo and The Chartered Men), it recreates the look and voice of an early newsreel actuality to bring one small corner of the rubber boom to life.