Rangoon - A French film company is making a documentary on Burma's elephants employed in the logging industry which will compare their lifestyles with those employed in tourism in Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, media reports said Sunday.
Compass Films finished three weeks in the Bago Mountains filming the Burmese segment of the program, which is to be shown on the National Geographic Channel, the Myanmar Times reported.
Shooting will also take place in Thailand, India and Sri Lanka, before the documentary is completed by the end of this year and aired in the first half of 2011, Compass Film director Klaus Reisinger said.
The 90-minute documentary, to be entitled Life Size Memories, will compare the life of elephants to those of humans and also compare their different working conditions in the four selected Asian countries.
"Elephants are individuals, just like people are. We try to show how different they are from one another. They have different personalities, faces, histories and styles," Raisinger told The Myanmar Times, an English-language weekly.
The film company decided to document working pachyderms in Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India because elephants are treated differently in each country.
"In Thailand , elephants don't work in the timber industry - they work in the tourist industry. And they are not in very good shape because the conditions aren't good," Raisinger said.
"Even though logging is very hard work for the elephants, they have fixed working hours. When they aren't working, they are free to roam the forest naturally. But in Thailand and Sri Lanka elephants are kept confined," he said.
Reisinger and his fellow filmmaker Frederique Lengaigne have already shot two films in Burma, both of which were shown on National Geographic Channel.
The first, aired in 2000, was called Elephant Power. The second was afilm on Burma's Sea Gypsies who live in the Myeik Archipelago, filmed in 2002.
The pair obtained permission to film elephants working with the Myanmar Timber Enterprise, under the Ministry of Forestry, with the help of the Htoo Foundation, the charitable arm of Htoo Trading, a leading business enterprise in Burma with close connections with the military.
