Late one Friday evening, I was in Singapore, when a call came from Exploration Productions, the Toronto production division of Discovery Canada, who wanted to know if I could travel to Java almost immediately to shoot a documentary about the Indonesian villagers living in the most active region of the ‘Ring of Fire’. Three days later, Canadian producer, Elliott Shiff and I arrived in Yogyakarta to meet up with Bali-based sound recordist Will Hemmerle and production manager Ruddy Legoh.

For the next five frenetic days Ruddy, who had family in the town and a great knowledge of the area, drove us hundreds of miles at warp speed to get us to the best locations to shoot the ingredients of our film. As a fixer the man was a genius, but as a driver he was a demon!

A chance meeting with Sky cameraman Phil Hooper, who was actually heading home because it didn’t look as if the mountain would blow on his watch, revealed that the mountain onlyphotographed well at dawn. So, thanks to Phil, we rescheduled our wake-up calls to 04.00 to enable us to get to the base for the hero shots at sunrise – and he was right because at the end of the one hour, death-defying daily drive, the mountain looked absolutely spectacular through the long HD lens.

Talking to Maridjan

As the human face of Mt Merapi,Maridjan was a critical ingredient in our film. At dawn on Tuesday, after performing his daily prayers he escorted us through the quiet village of Kinahrejoto a narrow track where we began to ascend the smoking volcano. Now well into his late seventies, Maridjan has climbed the mountain almost every day of his life. His bare feet keep him in close contact with the fertile soil and as he walks he uses a hoe to redirect the rainwater from the pathway into of the valley below. Ninety minutes later we cleared the tree-line and came face to face with his awesome responsibility — The Mountain of Fire

In a long and very honest interview, he talked about the consequences of that responsibility and how the local villagers recognise that they live with a similar balance between life, death and nature that a fisherman has with the sea. To Maridjan, the mountain was angry with those responsible for the industrial sand mining on its slopes and the dramatic eruptions each day were its way of registering disapproval. After more shots of the current eruptions, we followed our guide back down the mountain to find farmers and the local media awaiting his daily assessment of the mood of the mountain. Over the next four days we travelled the countryside seeking out storytelling images of rice planters, duck herders, schoolgirls and market vendors, all going about their daily lives against the backdrop of the ominous, smoking mountain; we talked to Indonesian vulcanologists about the balance they seek between their own scientific knowledge and the spiritual beliefs of the people around them; and we interviewed a man who had survived the last great eruption of 1994, now living with horrific scars from