THE FILM

​

Colonise. To take land, culture, history, minds, and bodies. 

Decolonise. To win back that taken. 

Revolution. To build a new future free of history's violent baggage. 

 

Ophir tells the story of an extraordinary revolution for life, land and culture, leading up to the potential creation of the world’s newest nation in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.

​

A poetic yet dramatic ode to the indelible thirst of a peoples 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.

WHY THIS FILM?

​

Our world is in Crisis. The Crisis of global warming, of the uninterrupted race for natural resources, of forests burning on every continent, of democracies in loss of certainties. The Crisis that mobilises people to join the collective cries of #metoo, #FridaysForFuture, #blacklivesmatter, and of indigenous peoples and exploited workers around the world.
 
The Crisis almost always leads us back to our chequered past. Finally, the issues related to the colonial legacies of the “great” Western powers catapult to the forefront. Our collective narrative is being sought: Who are we? Where are we going? The Crisis, what is this phenomenon? Who do we listen to, who do we believe? Can we begin to repair as quickly as we destroy? Meanwhile, the struggles for survival do not wait.
 
Ophir exposes the roots of this integral Crisis, 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. Decades of change by colonisers and years of exploitation of the giant Panguna mine led to the tragic decade-long conflict known as the Bougainville Crisis, a deadly war between colonial powers and a local Bougainvillean resistance, in a bid to secede from their motherland Papua New Guinea, which was propped up by Australia and one of the biggest mining giants, Rio Tinto.
 
The conflict killed around 20,000 Bougainvilleans, wiping out approximately 10% of the island’s population. The largest conflict in the Pacific region since the Second World War, where a small group of islanders first armed with bows and arrows fought helicopters and guns. It is often referred to as the the first « eco-revolution » in the world.
 
Some say Bougainvilleans were guided by nature. That "when nature fights at your side, you cannot lose". 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. A conception of existence in which women and men, culture and the environment, form an inseparable whole, a vector of harmony and peace. This may seem utopian. Yet, the people of Bougainville led their revolution in the mountains and jungle and won.

For the outside observer it was yet another episode in post-colonial bloodletting. For those on the ground it was an attempt to exfoliate a century of history and find new ground for building a society based in dignity, balance and respect.
 
Ophir thus tells the story of Bougainville, but also the much broader filigree story of a difficult attempt to decolonise the mind in the polarised world of the 21st century, which must face the urgency of profound reflections for its future. In a consultative referendum in December 2019, the population of Bougainville voted nearly 98% in favour of independence and could in the near future become the newest nation in the world. But which nation? Bougainville has a rare opportunity to explore a new road.
 
By inviting the audience into this story, Ophir takes a plunge into the deepest waters of colonialism and its invisible mechanisms and mindsets that still shapes the world and its institutions as we know it.

​

​