Cannibal Tours

Cannibal Tours is two journeys. The first is that depicted – rich and bourgeois tourists on a luxury-cruise up the mysterious Sepik River, in the jungles of Papua New Guinea … the packaged version of a heart of darkness. The second journey (the real text of the film) is a metaphysical one. It is an attempt to discover the place of ‘the Other’ in the popular imagination. It affords a glimpse at the real (mostly unconsidered or misunderstood) reasons why ‘civilised’ people wish to encounter the ‘primitive’. The situation is that shifting terminus of civilisation, where modern mass-culture grates and pushes against those original, essential aspects of humanity; and where much of what passes for values in western culture is exposed in stark relief as banal and fake. (Dennis O’Rourke)