Eux et Moi, un ethnologue en Papouasie occidentale Série-Collection : L' Usage du Monde

Stéphane Breton
2001 - 63 min - Digital vidéo - Couleur - France

For the last few years an ethnographer has regularly gone to a small New Guinea village. He speaks the languages of these people who walk around naked with bows and arrows, who dispute over forest gardens with axes, and who have a short fuse like our own French peasants. He knows them well, but a certain discomfort subsists between them. They seem to be interested only in his toothbrush, they too often take him for a cash machine.
He finally comes to realise, while filming the monetary dealings and negotiations he has with them, that all of this, what he didn't want to see and was ashamed of, is in fact what bound them together. Only after a detour through impurity and self-interest could they find common ground.
We discover people who are no more savage than our next door neighbours. We end up forgetting that they live so far away. We watch with bemused smiles as the ethnographer and these people, who didn't boo him off the stage, get their feet wet in a friendship made the hard way.