British film-maker Bruce Parry worked for many years making ethnographic documentaries for the BBC (Tribe, Amazon, Arctic) about extreme environments and the indigenous people who lived in them. Now having struck on his own, he’s made this well-meaning but rather woolly doc, co-directed by Mark Ellam, about Parry’s quest to understand … well, it’s not really clear.
There’s a lot of trekking through the jungle with the Penam, a tribe in Borneo whose simple, hunter-gatherer lifestyle is under threat from evil palm-oil plantation owners. Then there’s a spell spent in India learning about how to be still from gurus, before it’s back to Blighty to talk to some scientists and philosophers about neuroscience and whatnot.
Although Parry comes across as a crinkly-eyed nice guy with noble intentions, he’s so incessantly earnest and whispery voiced with awe at the wisdom of these indigenous people that the sanctimony starts to pong like over-ripe durian and rotting marigold garlands.
