Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Anderson, Robin / All Films

The Highlands Trilogy

Wed, 5 Sep 2018 11:07:00 GMT

The Highlands Trilogy
Buy Now: $850.00

From two of Australia's most distinguished filmmakers, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson (Rats in the Ranks, Facing the Music), comes The Highlands Trilogy: The Complete Collection DVD Box Set, featuring three stunning, critically acclaimed documentaries.

Set in the Papua New Guinea Highlands and shot over ten years, First Contact (1983), followed by Joe Leahy's Neighbors (1989) and Black Harvest (1992) have won 30 national and international awards, including an Academy Award nomination for First Contact. All three won the Grand Prix at France's prestigious Festival Cinema du Reel, and AFI awards for Best Documentary.

The complete trilogy is available through DER on DVD - for the first time ever in the United States. This special edition DVD set contains the individual films plus filmmaker interviews and ABC broadcast reviews of each film.

Films in the Highlands Trilogy

First Contact
Joe Leahy's Neighbors
Black Harvest

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First Contact

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

First Contact
Buy Now: $320.00

The classic film of cultural confrontation that is as compelling today as when it was first released over 35 years ago.

When Columbus and Cortez ventured into the New World there was no camera to record the drama of this first encounter. But in 1930 when the Leahy brothers penetrated the interior of New Guinea in search of gold, they carried a movie camera. Thus they captured on film their unexpected confrontation with thousands of Stone Age people who had no concept of human life beyond their valleys. This amazing footage forms the basis of First Contact. Yet there is more to this extraordinary film than the footage that was recovered. Fifty years later some of the participants are still alive and vividly recall their unique experience.

The Papuans tell how they thought the white men were their ancestors, bleached by the sun and returned from the dead. They were amazed at the artifacts of 20th century life such as tin cans, phonographs and airplanes. When shown their younger, innocent selves in the found footage, they recall the darker side of their relationship with these mysterious beings with devastating weapons. Australian Dan Leahy describes his fear at being outnumbered by primitive looking people with whom he could not speak. He felt he had to dominate them for his own survival and to continue his quest for gold.

First Contact is one of those rare films that holds an audience spell-bound. Humor and pathos are combined in this classic story of colonialism, told by the people who were there.

Films in the The Highlands Trilogy

First Contact

Joe Leahy's Neighbors

Black Harvest

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Joe Leahy's Neighbors

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

Joe Leahy's Neighbors
Buy Now: $340.00

This film is the followup of First Contact. It traces the fortunes of Joe Leahy, the mixed-race son of Australian explorer Michael Leahy, in his uneasy relationship with his tribal neighbors. Joe built his coffee plantation on land bought from the Ganiga in the mid 1970s. European educated, raised in the highlands of Papua, freed by his mixed race from the entanglements of tribal obligation, Joe leads a Western lifestyle governed by individualism and the pursuit of affluence.

While Joe may live in Western grandeur, he is still surrounded by his subsistence level Ganiga "neighbors," who never let him forget the original source of his prosperity. Joe spends much of his waking hours just keeping the lid on things.

Filmmakers Connolly and Anderson lived for eighteen continuous months on the edge of Joe's plantation, in the "no man's land" between Leahy and the Ganiga. Their lively, non-judgemental narrative eloquently captures the conflicting values of tribalism and capitalism.

"This is one of the best ethnographic movies I've seen. It's set in the New Guinea highlands and focuses on Joe Leahy, a half-white, half-Ganiga owner of a coffee plantation whose role in the community is fraught with ambiguity. Is he (as some claim) a colonialist exploiter, ripping off his Ganiga brothers? Or, on the contrary, is he a new kind of tribal chief, one who brings economic development to a place badly in need of modernization? Anderson and Connolly deftly lay out the situation; but they do not tell us what to make of Leahy or his role in New Guinea. You leave the theater aware that, in its very complexity and lack of resolution, this movie reveals something profound about what's going on in New Guinea, and many other "developing" countries." — Los Angeles Weekly

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Grand Prix, Cinema du Reel, Paris

Earthwatch Award

Best Documentary, Australian Film Institute Awards

Best Documentary, Australian Film Critics Circle

Award of Excellence, Society for Visual Anthropology

Basil Wright Prize, Best Documentary, Royal Anthropological Institute

Grand Prix, Festival dAurillac

Films in the The Highlands Trilogy

First Contact

Joe Leahy's Neighbors

Black Harvest

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Black Harvest

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 09:36:00 GMT

Black Harvest
Buy Now: $340.00

Black Harvest, the final film in the Highlands Trilogy, charts the progress of Joe Leahy in convincing the Ganiga tribespeople to join him in a coffee growing venture. He provides the money and the expertise; they supply the land and labor. But on the eve of success, the world coffee price collapses and tribal warfare erupts in the valley. Always suspect because of his mixed-race status, Joe is in deep trouble with the tribespeople when his promises of riches fail to materialize. As he organizes to emigrate with his family to Australia, he is a saddened man with an uncertain future.

Black Harvest was restored in 4K from the original 16mm camera negatives and master audio elements in 2024.

EXTRA FEATURES:

excerpt from Sunday Review - 10 min

interview with filmmaker Bob Connolly - 19 min

"...a documentary of extraordinary historical resonance... so rich that watching it feels like taking an inspired crash course in economics and cultural anthropology."
— Stephen Holden, The New York Times

"Perhaps the best documentary of all at Sundance was the Australian Black Harvest. With the scale and richness of classical tragedy, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson's movie records the clash between tribalism and capitalism, the ancient and the modern, and the downfall of a man caught between two cultures. ..The audience is witness to a spectacle few fiction writers could rival."
— Newsweek

"...a brilliant and utterly convincing film. As a demonstration of how a documentary should be made it will repay study a hundred years from now. I find it difficult to praise this film too highly."
— Evan Williams, The Australian

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Grand Prix, Cinema du Reel, Paris

Best Documentary, Australian Film Institute Awards

Basil Wright Prize - Best Documentary, Royal Anthropological Institute

Best in Category, San Francisco FF Golden Gate Awards

Best Documentary, Sydney Film Festival

Robert Flaherty Grand Prize, Yamagata Int. Documentary Festival

Best Documentary, Hawaian Film Festival

Best Documentary, Vancouver Film Festival

Best Documentary, Los Angeles Association of Film Critic

Best Documentary, Australian Film Critics Circle

Special Jury Award, Audience Award - Best Documentary, Amsterdam Documentary Festival

Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival, 1993

Films in the The Highlands Trilogy

First Contact

Joe Leahy's Neighbors

Black Harvest

Visit Anderson, Robin to see additional products in this category.