Mondo sensation in the nearly independent Papua New Guinea

Mondo-like Italo-Japanese documentary shot in Papua New Guinea, directed and produced by Akira Ide (Eating the Earth, A Brutal History of the Vietnam War) with a music by the great film composer Riz Ortolani (Mondo Cane, Non si Sevizia un Paperino), and narrated by Sergio Fiorentini (Bello come un Arcangelo). We go for what is said "the darkness of prehistory", "1 million years in the past" like in the famous Raquel Welch's film, in these eastern highlands which "slightly seem to belong to our planet", at Goroka, where already "the camera went back in time to the stone age" in Mondo Cane.

A Papuan crowd with "pikes and javelins" welcomes for this year 1974 Queen Elisabeth and Prince Consort Philip, landing to visit a country on the verge of independence. The contrast is thus put between the intruding modern world and habits becoming to the most traditional past of New Guinea. And the documentary begins to add up shocking scenes of the weird customs of several tribes.

Death is specially treated with widows having their finger roughly cut, eating maggots swarming in their husband's head, rubbing their breasts and legs with the smelling liquid pouring out his decaying body, or smoking his suspended corpse for "wind funeral" so that he could be preserved for over half a century. For there "an obsessive love" lies even "beyond death". And love itself demonstrates curiously with the famous male hunting by "possessed-like women", couple making love in the jungle while chasing perturbing insects, or queer male "third sex" couples presented as gay people patting their noses.

The presumed cannibals in fact eat rather pigs, slain with the usual clubs for a chief's daughter's wedding, sago, carefully prepared to make a nutritive batter, bats, snakes, lizards and even crocodiles, and drink kava, "a hallucinogenic drug" produced by "munching and sputtering" the root of a tropical pepper shrub. But the film manages to get us thrilled with the chase by an Australian officer and his patrol of Zugema, an inveterate cannibal, a human arm resting from his former meal being shown. Entrenched in his isolated hut, will he be finally caught and arrested? He should anyway only be condemned to a few years of work in a farm, before returning home prestigious and even able to become a chief.

If another presumed cannibal meal is briefly shown across a river, the film however prefers focus on bloody scenes of scarification, with a young girl having her cheek tattooed with a thorn "for the sake of beauty" or a man having his back cut by a razor blade to "look like a crocodile". Are also shown lepers thrown into a river, a touristic exhibition turning after a dispute into a real and massive tribal warfare, head-hunting pygmies whose "ferociousness is inversely proportional to the tallness", a Tidikawa like "sorcerer gifted with mediumistic powers" who queries spirits to find the responsible of a death and get revenge, mudmen's silent protective pantomime representing the dead, his relatives and the flies, nose piercing and pumpkins and shells used as sex cover, groups of men or women complacently bathing unclothed in the river, and a feminist meeting because women "should be valued more than five pigs".

The documentary could have been interesting but is spoiled by approximative or trivial commentaries, the aim being not to explain properly but to shock merely the spectator through sensationalism.

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Mondo-style documentary where a movie crew travels to newly independent Papua New Guinea to capture the customs and culture of the cannibal natives.

Nuova Guinea, l'isola dei cannibali (1974)

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Nuova Guinea, l'isola dei cannibali

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