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A piano at 4,000 metres in Bhutan
High in the remote highlands of Bhutan, 12-year-old pianist Hillary O’Sullivan travelled with a piano and a message. The Girl and Her Piano follows her to 4,000 metres above sea level, where she performed in the presence of the King of Bhutan.
She played surrounded by highland people who live with the effects of global warming daily, stirred by a desire to keep speaking through music for places that cannot speak for themselves.
Directed by Elaine Lim in her filmmaking debut, the film is eleven minutes long and free to watch. As Hillary’s notes carry across the mountains, her narration reflects the clarity of a generation that refuses to wait.
She was the first foreigner and the youngest performer invited to the Royal Highland Festival since it began in 2016. Bhutan is the world’s first declared carbon-negative nation. It is also losing its glaciers.
“Himalayan glaciers could lose up to 80% of their ice by the year 2100 due to global warming,” Hillary says in the narration. “As part of the younger generation, I sometimes feel small compared to the huge problem we are facing.”
“HILLARY CAPTIVATED the audience with her powerful message of climate change action.This is poignantly captured in The Girl and Her Piano, a documentary which amplifies awareness for our climate through the art of music. The Girl and Her Piano transcends borders and inspires action and hope towards climate sustainability for future generations.”Bhutan Royal Highland Festival
Hillary O’Sullivan, pianist and climate ambassador
Hillary O’Sullivan is a Singaporean pianist who uses her music to argue for the climate. She is the subject of The Girl and Her Piano.
She began playing at three. She has given solo recitals on remote islands in Indonesia and the Maldives, to villagers and their children, and in 2018 made a photo-documentary, “Above the Sands”, on the people of Bunaken, interviewing and photographing them to understand their lives.
At eleven she travelled to Antarctica as the youngest Key Opinion Ambassador of the Antarctic Climate Expedition, performing ‘Rhapsody of a Changing Antarctic’, written for the expedition by Belgian composer Eric Bettens.
Later that year came Bhutan, and the Royal Highland Festival in Laya: the first foreigner and youngest performer invited since the festival began in 2016. His Majesty The King envisioned the festival to preserve and celebrate Bhutan’s highland culture while promoting the country’s work on climate resilience.
In the summer of 2025 she returned to the ice as a climate ambassador, this time in the high Arctic, on an expedition hosted by Dr Sylvia Earle, who had also been aboard in Antarctica. At 82 degrees north, on moving pack ice, she played a grand piano. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere on Earth, and the poles hold the ice the rest of us depend on.
She has now performed at both poles and at 4,000 metres in the Himalaya. Her next journey takes her to Sumatra, for Hands Like Ours: Orangutans in the Leuser Canopy.
“I DREAM of a world where children like myself can continue to embrace their lives in safety.”Hillary O’Sullivan
Photographs from Laya, Bhutan
“CLIMATE CHANGE, something I have witnessed in the Antarctic, is not just a distant problem far away. It is also happening here in Bhutan and the Himalayas.”Hillary O’Sullivan
Cast, Crew and Partners
