'On behalf of the living'. A film screening as part of the anthropology seminar series

An anthropologist embarks on a belief-experiment to better understand a world in which the spirits of the dead are alive and active. Ton Otto first came to Baluan Island in Papua New Guinea as a PhD student to learn about the local culture by participating in it. That project goes on, and some islanders say he is ready to ritually contact the spirit of his late adoptive father on the island. Ton's father in Maastricht, a devout Catholic, urges him to go ahead with those rites in all sincerity, reasoning that ‘miracles can happen’. His mother, though, remains sceptical. Christian Suhr, Ton’s long-time ethnographic film partner, is not fully convinced either. Their struggles over how to approach the filming are laid bare on screen. Ton’s adoptive sisters, Ninou and Asap, are ready to help him reach out to their father on the other side, but brother Pwanou will not join, since he believes that the Bible forbids the summoning of spirits. All this sets up an intricate cross-cultural film essay on the human impulse to engage the supernatural, for good and ill.

The film will be presented by Gary Kildea:

Gary Kildea was born in Sydney, Australia. He started his working life in a film studio as a sound assistant and later moved into film editing; working on commercials, dramatic features and documentaries. In the early 1970s he moved to Papua New Guinea taking a job as a director/cinematographer for the national film unit. In 1975 he travelled to England and studied drama film direction at the National Film and Television School. After that he returned to Australia and worked on independent documentaries in the Asia/Pacific region. He came to the Australian National University in Canberra in the mid-1980s to run its Ethnographic Film Unit. Since 2008 he also worked part-time coaching in documentary at the Visual Cultural Studies programme (now Visual Anthropology) at the University of Tromsø, Norway. He continues to work as an independent documentary editor/filmmaker based in Australia. Some of his films as director are: The Great Chimbu Pig Festival (1972); Concerning the Lives of the People (1973); Trobriand Cricket - an ingenious response to colonialism (1975); Ileksen (1978); Celso and Cora - a Manila story (1984); Valencia Diary (1991); Man of Strings (1999); Koriam's Law (2005).