We Flew to Kuala Lumpur to Find Out What Is Really on Your Plate in Bali.

Written by Tristan D. Rama / 7 Minute Read

Left to Right: Yudi Suarbawa, Pande Satya, Tristan D. Rama, Panji Dharmajaya

Picture by Pande Satya – Taken at Kuala Lumpur / Tainted Bites: A Hidden Threat on Our Plate (2025)

Team TDR FILMS at Kuala Lumpur

“Bali has a plastic problem it would rather not talk about. We made a film about it anyway.”

Bali is one of the most photographed places on earth. Emerald rice fields, sacred temples, seafood eaten at sunset on the Indian Ocean. What that image does not show is what researchers have been quietly documenting for years: that the waters surrounding this island are heavily contaminated with microplastics, and that the seafood coming out of those waters is carrying them directly onto the plates of locals and tourists alike.

That is the subject of Tainted Bites: A Hidden Threat on Our Plate, a documentary TDR FILMS produced for OceanHero, the web search engine and ocean conservation platform funding environmental impact content across Southeast Asia. The film is finished. It is on IMDb. And it is currently being taken into schools across Indonesia to show children what is actually in their food.

To make it, we had to leave Bali entirely.

Why there is no expert in Bali for this

When we started production, the question was straightforward: who is the right person to speak on camera about what microplastics do to the human body when consumed continuously through seafood? The answer, after research, was not in Bali. It was not even in Jakarta. It was at Universiti Putra Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, where Dr. Saliza Mohd Elias has been conducting research specifically focused on the physiological impact of long-term microplastic ingestion on the human body.

Malaysia made sense for more than just the expert. It shares a coastline with the same body of water. Its fishing communities share similar ocean behaviour and seafood consumption patterns with Indonesia. The contamination story that runs through Bali’s waters does not stop at a national border. Going to KL was not a workaround. It was the right call scientifically and geographically.

It was also TDR FILMS’ first production outside Indonesia. And it did not start smoothly.

The eSIM, the fraud, and finding UPM without signal

We landed in Kuala Lumpur with a production schedule, a campus address, and an eSIM that turned out to be completely fraudulent. No signal. No maps. No way to navigate to Universiti Putra Malaysia in a city none of us had ever worked in before. For a team used to knowing every back road in Bali, it was a sharp reminder that your first time outside your home country has a way of humbling you before the work even begins.

We got there. It took longer than it should have and involved more asking strangers for directions than any production plan accounts for. But we got there. And once we were inside the lab, none of it mattered anymore. That is the thing about documentary work. The logistics can fall apart around you as long as what ends up on camera holds.

What Bali does not want to admit

Here is the uncomfortable truth that sits at the center of this film. Bali has a plastic waste crisis that is not an accident. It is the result of decades of rapid tourism growth without the infrastructure to manage the waste that growth produces. Plastic enters the waterways. It breaks down into microparticles. Those particles enter the ocean. The fish eat them. And then the fish end up on the menu at the same restaurants that are selling the Bali dream to visitors from around the world.

This is not a fringe concern. It is a public health issue that the local government has been slow to treat with the urgency it deserves. Regulations around single-use plastics exist on paper. Enforcement is inconsistent. The political will to hold the tourism and packaging industries accountable runs directly into the economic dependence on both. So the conversation gets managed, softened, and deferred.

Tainted Bites does not defer it. The film asks directly: if we know what microplastics do to the human body when consumed over time, and we know the seafood in Bali’s waters is carrying them, what are we actually serving people? That question deserves a straight answer. The documentary gives one.

Why OceanHero is taking it into schools

OceanHero, the conservation-focused web search platform that funded the film, made a specific choice about where this documentary would do the most good. Not film festivals. Not streaming platforms. Schools across Indonesia.

The logic is sound. The generation that will actually fix this problem is still in classrooms. If you can show a twelve year old in Bali what microplastics are doing to the seafood their family eats, you are not just educating a child. You are sending that information home to a household, into a community, and eventually into the social pressure that forces policy to move faster than it otherwise would.

That is what a documentary can do that a campaign cannot. A campaign asks people to feel something. A documentary gives people something to know. And knowledge, in the hands of the right audience, changes behaviour in ways that a thirty second spot never will.

What this project means for how we work

Tainted Bites was the first time TDR FILMS crossed a national border to complete a production. It will not be the last. The story we needed was in Malaysia. So that is where we went. No signal, no familiar streets, no safety net of knowing the city. Just the brief, the camera, and the responsibility to get it right for a client whose mission is bigger than a deliverable.

That willingness to go wherever the story actually is, rather than where it is convenient, is what separates documentary work from content production. Content fills a schedule. Documentary follows the truth. Even when the truth is sitting in a university lab in Kuala Lumpur and your eSIM seller turned out to be a fraud.

Tainted Bites: A Hidden Threat on Our Plate is available on IMDb. It is currently being screened in schools across Indonesia. If you want to understand what is in your food, it is worth an hour of your time.