Director Chris Owen
Anthropologist Alfred Gell
Country/Production UK
Release 1981
Length 50 mins
Format Colour / DVD or VHS
Location Papua New Guinea, West Sepik Province / Pacific
Ethnic Group Umeda
Order No RAI-200.130
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In a remote part of the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea, the Umeda people eke out a difficult living from the sago swamps and primary rain forest that surround them. Until recently, these people performed an annual ceremony, the Ida, which dramatised their relationship to the forest and celebrated their continuing survival. The ceremony was the major social occasion of their year in essence a fertility ritual focussing on a complex metamorphosis of figures representing cassowaries. This film is a record of the Ida ceremony, and an analysis of it, seen through the eyes of anthropologist Alfred Gell.
