RAI FILM PRIZE 2005

 

At the 9th International Festival of Ethnographic Film, Oxford, 18-21 September 2005, the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Prize went to:

 

Koriam's Law and the Dead Who Govern (Australia, 2005, 110 minutes).

 

A film by Gary Kildea, Andrea Simon and Andrew Lattas. Co-produced by the ANU RSPAS Film Unit, Canberra, and Arcadia Pictures, New York.

 

Enquiries: gary.kildea@anu.edu.au.

 

"In Koriam's Law Australian anthropologist Andrew Lattas meets his match in philosopher-informant Peter Avarea of Matong village, Pomio, Papua New Guinea.

 

Motivated by their lively dialogues the film sets out to place that most misconstrued of cultural phenomena, the "cargo-cult", in a universalising light.

 

The Pomio Kivung Movement was founded in 1964 by a local leader called Koriam.

 

In the face of official condemnation its political and religious philosophy sought to uncover that path to a perfect existence which the colonising whites seemed to have found and selfishly monopolised.

 

Kivung leaders scrutinised the revelations of missionaries for hidden truths and codes. They examined, too, forms of colonial governance - especially money and bureaucracy - for clues to the source of their power. Koriam's central problem was how to find a way back from the original ancestral fault that surely put his people in this subjugated state in the first place.

 

He incorporated and localised parts of Christianity whilst seeking an ever closer embrace of the beloved dead, inducing and imploring them to hasten their return so that the deprivations and humiliations of racial inequality might end. In the mean time, the twin organs of white power, Mission and Government, needed to be carefully and cleverly propitiated.

 

Koriam's Law concerns itself with the contemporary works and understandings of the Pomio Kivung. The movement's leaders are keen to show that it has nothing to do with 'waiting for cargo'. Rather, its mission is to prepare the way for the devoutly wished 'change' and, at the same time, to organise for a better society in the here and now.

 

The film is set in the Jacquinot Bay area of Papua New Guinea's East New Britain province. Andrew - a willing foil to Pomio humour as much as introspection - figures as one character among many in this non-fictional play on the desire that impels all cultures to control the ideas that define their origins and existence."