Documentary Educational Resources - Geography / Oceania / Papua New Guinea/Melanesia / All Films

On Behalf of the Living

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 09:47:44 GMT

On Behalf of the Living
Buy Now: $320.00

On Behalf of the Living unfolds on two levels: an exploration of humanity’s preoccupation with life after death and the story of one anthropologist’s experiment—taking his lifelong “participatory” research on a Papua New Guinea island to its logical, if counter-intuitive, conclusion.

The film is composed of three strands. The first includes footage that Ton Otto filmed with his parents in the Netherlands, where discussions of faith, God, and eternity are argued out ‘en famille’. The second strand takes place on Baluan Island, where Christian Suhr documents Ton’s reunion with his adoptive family. Before long, the two find themselves entangled in complex disputes —both spiritual and personal. The third strand, in a different register altogether, consists of a series of dialogues between Ton and Christian, one-on-one. Through alternating first-person perspectives, they interrogate and challenge each other with rare directness, questioning the very viability of their experiment—and even the anthropological project as a whole. This strand functions as a Greek Chorus, providing a check on the ideas and insights emerging from the main storyline. While probing the realm of the ancestors, the film’s primary source and frame of reference remain the lived experiences of the people—mostly family—that it embraces with its lens.

Writing about his motivation for making the film, Ton writes that he was interested in confronting “one of the great mysteries of human life: its ending. What happens after our biological demise? What kinds of afterlife are imaginable? How do we continue to relate to our dead loved ones? Being an anthropologist by profession I was driven to immerse myself in different cultural worlds, not only to discover alternative beliefs and practices but also to challenge my own ideas about the continuities and discontinuities between the living and the dead.”

"On Behalf of the Living is a stunning film. It is about Papua New Guinea, and the Netherlands and Denmark, but even more, it is about the nature of human life and death. Terrence Malick-like in its scope, it is also the best film of any kind about religion I have seen in a long time…It is a major piece of work."
— Prof. Joel Robbins, Cambridge University, UK

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Ethnografilm, France, 2024

NAFA Int'l Ethnographic Film Festival, Denmark, 2023

Int'l Festival of Ethnological Film, Macedonia, 2023

Ethnofest - Athens Ethnographic Film Festival. Greece, 2023

European Society for Oceanists, France, 2022

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Ophir

Fri, 6 May 2022 14:37:33 GMT

Ophir
Buy Now: $320.00

Ophir tells the story of an extraordinary Indigenous revolution for life, land and culture: a poetic and dramatic ode to the thirst for freedom, culture and sovereignty. The film sheds light on the biggest conflict of the Pacific since WWII, revealing the visible and invisible chains of colonisation and its enduring cycles of physical and psychological warfare.

Voiced entirely by the Indigenous people of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, the film deconstructs the mechanisms of exploitation through the colonisation of land and its people, who at the end of the 1980s were left with no choice but to revolt for their right to exist. A small group of islanders first armed with bows and arrows fought helicopters and guns. They defiantly defended the core principles that formed the basis of their society, in the face of absolute destruction of their mental, physical, and spiritual conception of what it means to be human.

It was a decade-long civil war which killed around 20,000 Bougainvilleans, wiping out approximately 10% of the island's population.

The people of Bougainville ultimately won in their fight against the colonial powers, in a bid to secede from their motherland Papua New Guinea, despite the government's support from Australia and one of the biggest of the mining giants, Rio Tinto.

“(5 out of 5 stars)...may be the best environmental documentary I have ever seen. It is rare to see an indigenous lead revolution succeed, and rarer still to hear about such success. This documentary gives the viewer a chance to hear the residents of Bougainville speak for themselves in their own words. They speak of colonialism and all of its faces. Beautiful poetry is used to drive this documentary from segment to segment, connecting the thoughts and ideas spoken by this film’s subjects to one another through cultural expression." – J. Zimmerman, Video Librarian

“Edifying... A remarkable reflection on the aftermath of an anti-colonial struggle.” – Christine Chaumeau, Télérama TTT

“It's just really an incredible film. It plays out like a Greek tragedy.” – Gabrielle Kelly, Guam IFF 2020 Jury Member

“The things that the filmmakers managed to see and film are quite exceptional.” – Eric Barbier, FIFO 2020 Jury President

Selected Screenings & Awards

Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, Toronto, 2023

Grand Prix, FIFO Int'l Documentary Film Festival of Oceania, Tahiti, 2020

Grand Prix ‘Sol de Oro’, Suncine Environmental Film Festival, Barcelona, Spain, 2020

Grand Jury Prize, Feature Documentary Competition, Guam Int'l Film Festival, USA, 2020

Grand Prix Rigoberta Menchú, Montréal First Peoples Festival, Canada, 2020

Audience Award, Noma Int'l Human Rights Film Festival, Portugal, 2021

Best Feature Film, All Living Things Environmental Film Festival, Panchgani, India, 2021

Best Foreign Film Award, AegeanDocs Int'l Film Festival, Greece, 2021

Film of the Year, FICA Festival Internacional de Cine Ambiental, Goias, Brazil, 2021

RAI Film Prize & Basil Wright Prize Nominee, RAI Film Festival, 2021

Silver Award, Millenium Int'l Documentary Film Festival, Brussels, Belgium, 2021
Grand Prix Best Feature Film, Cinema e Ambiente Avezzano, Italy, 2021
Special Jury Prize ‘Coup de Coeur du Jury’, Martinique Int'l Doc FF, Martinique, 2021
Special Jury Mention, Noma Int'l Human Rights Film Festival, Portugal, 2021
1st Special Jury Prize, Ecology of the Soul, Green Montenegro Int'l Film Festival, Montenegro, 2021
Best International Feature Film, PukaÑawi Int'l Human Rights Film Festival of Sucre, Bolivia, 2021
2nd Jury Prize, International Documentaries, Int'l Nature Film Festival Gödöllő, Hungary, 2021
Best Feature Film, Festiver Festival de Cine Verde de Barichara, Colombia, 2021
Benedetto Senni Award, Terra di Tutti Film Festival, Italy, 2021
Best Feature Film, Youth Jury, Serra de Estrela Int’l Environmental Film Festival, Portugal, 2021
Best Documentary Feature Film, Dili Int'l Film Festival, Timor-Leste, 2021
Best Environmental Film, Bogocine Bogota Int'l Film Festival, Colombia, 2021
Best Feature Film, Mallku Features, Arica Nativa Festival, Chile, 2021
Best Script, Filmambiente Festival, Brazil, 2021
Best Feature Film, Greenfest Belgrade, Serbia, 2021

Environmental Justice Award, Eugene Environmental Film Festival, USA, 2022
Best International Feature Film, Ecozine Film Festival, Spain, 2022

Best Feature Documentary Award, Gibara Int'l Film Festival, Cuba, 2022
Best Film, Best Feature Documentary, Int'l Documentary Film Festival of Ierapetra, Greece, 2022
Invited in Competition, Asia Pacific Screen Awards, 2022

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Voices of the Rainforest

Wed, 29 May 2019 10:52:27 GMT

Voices of the Rainforest
Buy Now: $340.00

Voices of the Rainforest: A Day in the Life of Bosavi is a 70-minute cinema concert–an experiential documentary about the ecological and aesthetic coevolution of Papua New Guinea's Bosavi rainforest region and its inhabitants. Through sound and image, the film immerses viewers in the rainforest, and makes audible myriad connections between the everyday sounds of the rainforest biosphere and the creative practices of singing to, with, and about it by the Bosavi people. Structured around a day in the life of the rainforest and the music it inspires for the Bosavi people, the film brings to life the everyday activities of work, leisure, and ritual–heard in the full ambient setting of the rainforest–throughout the day and night.

Voices of the Rainforest was produced by Steven Feld and Dennis Leonard and Directed by Steven Feld and Jeremiah Ra Richards in collaboration with the Bona community of Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. Feld conducted anthropological and ethnomusicological fieldwork in Bosavi from 1975 to 2000. The original Voices of the Rainforest CD was produced during this time (1991) with production support from Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. Working with acclaimed sound editor Dennis Leonard at Skywalker Sound in 2016-2017, Feld recomposed a 25th anniversary 7.1 Voices soundtrack. A 2018 return to Bosavi with filmmaker Jeremiah Ra Richards and digitization of Feld's extensive archival photographs led to the creation of the immersive film joined to the 7.1 soundtrack.

Voices of the Rainforest is the first in a series of films based on Feld's work. While Voices offers a visualization of the original audio experience, New Voices of the Rainforest, the companion film, will provide an update on the state of the forest and the problems of development in what remains a remote and underserved region of Papua New Guinea.

This Deluxe Edition includes a 150-page color photobook, 7.1 Blu-ray (with a 2.0 stereo track) and the 25th Anniversary edition audio CD.

All sales benefit the Bosavi Peoples Fund, advocating for environmental and cultural justice in a remote part of Papua New Guinea.

Selected Screenings & Awards

Honourable Mention, Documentary Film Prize, International Council for Traditional Music, 2020

Competition Category "Community and Equality," Vizantrop Film Festival, 2020

Academic Screenings

Scholarship Film Festival, U Pennsylvania, 2019

NYU Depts of Anthropology & Music, 2019

Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology UK, 2019

University of Eastern Finland, 2019

Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, 2019

Harvard University, 2019

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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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Cowboy and Maria In Town

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Cowboy and Maria In Town
Buy Now: $320.00

Attracted by the myths of town life and the chance of work, people from villages all over Papua New Guinea have come to the towns. Cowboy and Maria in Town tells the story of two such migrants living in the settlements that surround the capital, Port Moresby. Cowboy is a reformed 'rascal'- unemployed and illiterate with a criminal record. He invents an electric guitar out of scrap materials and plays his distinctive rock-and-roll on street corners, earning just enough for his family to get by. Maria lives an equally precarious existence. Seasonal gardening and her husband's small income as a night security guard are their sole means of survival. Only her resilient humor keeps her going when inter-tribal conflicts, inflamed by frustration and alcohol, erupt in the settlement. Cowboy and Maria are vital players in the new urban Papua New Guinea. Their interwoven stories highlight the consequences of urban drift, where traditional and Western values meet. These intelligent and determined optimists are far from being Third World victims; they go about their daily lives with humor and imagination, rising to the enormous cultural changes that confront them.

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Dani Films

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Dani Films
Buy Now: $500.00

Digitally Remastered 2-DVD Set

This special edition 2-disc DVD set includes:

• Dani Sweet Potatoes & Dani Houses digitally remastered

• commentary on both films by Karl Heider

• a narrated pictorial history (9 min) of Heider's career in archaeology and anthropology

In 1963, under the auspices of the EDC curriculum project Man: A Course of Study, an elementary social studies curriculum, Karl Heider returned to the central highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). Heider had spent the previous two years in the Grand Baliem Valley with Robert Gardner's Harvard-Peabody exhibition, and his intention was to return from this second trip with material to be used to teach American grade school students about digging-stick horticulture and house construction. However, after producing the Netsilik series, the EDC curriculum project fell victim to the political climate of the time. Heider spent the following years presenting Hubula (known as Dani* outside of the community) material himself, eventually producing the ethnographic classics, Dani Sweet Potatoes and Dani Houses.

About the films:

Dani Sweet Potatoes (19 min) A study of the sophisticated process of sweet potato horticulture developed by the Hubula. The film follows the Hubula sweet potato cycle from clearing off the old brush and weeds from a fallow field to planting, harvesting, cooking, and eating. At that time the Hubula had the simplest of tools - long pointed wooden poles used as digging sticks that are hardened in the fire and soaked in water - and they still used their stone-bladed adzes. (By now, most Hubula use steel shovels, axes, and bush knives and make stone adzes only for the tourist trade.)

Even though their tools are simple, their field system is intensive and sophisticated, with an intricate system of ditches. Perhaps the ditches were originally necessary to drain swampy land, but they now serves as both drainage and irrigation ditches, depending on whether rainfall is too little or too much. The ditches also hold compost. Weeds and topsoil collect there, later to be smeared back onto the garden beds. Pigs are part of the ecological system, plowing up the soil in search of food and fertilizing it with their droppings. In this film, we see people from a single neighborhood working alone in their own garden plots or, at times joining together in a cooperative work party.

Dani Houses (16 min) The film observes both round and square house construction techniques of the Hubula. It shows how the ground is cleared, walls are made from boards, poles lashed together, and roofs being thatched. Though it follows the house-building process from beginning to end, one is left asking the question: What happened after the houses were built?

*Note on term “Dani”

The preferred name for the community in these films is Hubula. The name "Dani" as used in these films is an exonym used by Moni, a neighboring group of people living west of the Baliem Valley. The name has been reproduced in many colonial and postcolonial texts, even until today.

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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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Her Name Came on Arrows

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Her Name Came on Arrows
Buy Now: $295.00

In the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, French anthropologist Maurice Godelier invites five of his Baruya friends and informants to his house to discuss Baruya kinship and rules of marriage. As Godelier poses questions, the kinship rules that provide the cohesive fabric of Baruya culture are brought to life. Abstract terms are given practical meanings as Godelier investigates Baruya customs of stealing wives, exchanging sisters for wives, stealing names and exchanging 'food for blood.'

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Gogodala

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:26:00 GMT

Gogodala
Buy Now: $320.00

This film examines the implications of the Australian colonial era for the Gogodala people of the Fly River Delta, Western Papua New Guinea. Excessive missionary zeal, tolerated and encouraged by the government, contributed to the almost total destruction of Gogodala art and culture. More recently, an indirect grant from the Australian government has enabled the people to reconstruct a traditional longhouse, along with a new meaning and function: as a cultural center.

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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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