Private Project

On behalf of the living

On behalf of the living is about the ways human beings relate to their dead. By immersing himself in daily life and religious rituals among family and adopted kin in the Netherlands and Papua New Guinea, anthropologist Ton Otto seeks to understand how people in very different cultures deal with the universal question of the existence of an afterlife. In continuous dialogue and confrontation, Ton Otto and his co-filmmaker Christian Suhr explore the limits of their knowledge and of filmic representation.

  • Ton Otto
    Director
    Unity through Culture; Ngat is Dead
  • Christian Suhr
    Director
    Light upon Light; Descending with Angels
  • Ton Otto
    Producer
  • Christian Suhr
    Producer
  • Gary Kildea
    Editor
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Feature
  • Runtime:
    1 hour
  • Completion Date:
    December 5, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    70,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Denmark
  • Country of Filming:
    Netherlands, Papua New Guinea
  • Language:
    Danish, Dutch, English, Other
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • European Society for Oceanists
    Ajaccio, Corsica
    France
    June 4, 2022
    preview
    official selection
  • Eye and Mind Ethnographic Film Club, Aarhus University
    Aarhus
    Denmark
    February 8, 2023
    preview
    special screening with Q&A
  • NAFA International Ethnographic Film Festival
    Copenhagen
    Denmark
    August 25, 2023
    National and world premiere
    Official Selection with Q&A
  • International Festival of Ethnological Film Kratovo
    Kratovo
    September 26, 2023
    Official Selection
  • Eyes and Lenses - Ethnographic Films Review
    Warsaw
    Poland
    November 25, 2023
    Official Selection - with Polish subtitles (and Q&A)
  • UCL-East Pool St. Cinema
    London
    United Kingdom
    November 27, 2023
    Special screening
  • Australian Anthropological Society Conference
    Sydney
    Australia
    November 30, 2023
    Official Selection
  • Ethnofest - Athens Ethnographic Film Festival
    Athens
    Greece
    December 1, 2023
    Official Selection
  • Ethnografilm
    Paris
    France
    March 29, 2024
    Official selection
  • ETlab Monash University
    Melbourne
    Australia
    April 4, 2024
    Special Screening with discussants and Q&A
  • The Cairns Institute, James Cook University
    Cairns
    Australia
    May 2, 2024
    Official Australian Premiere
    Special screening with Q&A
  • Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival (AAA)
    Tampa, Florida
    United States
    November 21, 2024
    North American Premiere
Distribution Information
  • Documentary Educational Resources, Inc.
    Distributor
    Country: Worldwide
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Ton Otto, Christian Suhr

TON OTTO, a Dutch citizen, is professor of anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark, and adjunct professor at James Cook University, Australia. He has conducted long-term ethnographic field research in Papua New Guinea and has published widely on issues of social and cultural change with a focus on the relationship between religion, historicity and agency. From the start of his fieldwork, he has made extensive use of audio-visual media, and this has resulted in a number of exhibition and film productions, including the award-winning films ‘Ngat is dead’ (2009, with Christian Suhr and Steffen Dalsgaard) and ‘Unity through Culture’ (2011, with Christian Suhr).

CHRISTIAN SUHR is a filmmaker and professor of anthropology at Aarhus University. His research has focused on experiences of spirit possession, psychiatric illnesses, religious healing, and how film can be used to approach unseen dimensions of human life. He is the director and author of the award-winning film and book "Descending with angels" (MUP 2019, www.descendingwithangels.com), and the award-winning films ‘Ngat is dead’ (2009, with Ton Otto and Steffen Dalsgaard) and ‘Unity through culture’ (2011, with Ton Otto). His latest film is ‘Light upon light’ (premiered CPH:DOX 2022).

GARY KILDEA (editor) is an Australian documentary film maker who has also lived and worked in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the UK. He has specialised in observational and ethnographic approaches and has often collaborated with anthropologists on film projects. He has held teaching positions in documentary film at the Australian National University, Canberra, and at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Some of his films as director are: The Great Chimbu Pig Festival (1972); Concerning the Lives of the People (1973); Trobriand Cricket - an ingenious response to colonialism (1975); Ileksen (1978); Celso and Cora - a Manila story (1984); Valencia Diary (1991); Man of Strings (1999); Koriam's Law (2005).

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

TON OTTO
My motivation for making this film is to confront one of the great mysteries of human life: its ending. What happens after our biological demise? What kinds of afterlife are imaginable? How do we continue to relate to our dead loved ones? Being an anthropologist by profession I was driven to immerse myself in different cultural worlds, not only to discover alternative beliefs and practices but also to challenge my own ideas about the continuities and discontinuities between the living and the dead. To understand my own background better, I invited my aging Dutch parents into the project before travelling to Baluan, an island in the South Pacific, together with my colleague filmmaker Christian Suhr. On Baluan I have intermittently carried out ethnographic fieldwork for more than 30 years and have become part of a local family as well. This time I wanted to find out how my adopted siblings continue to relate to our deceased father Ngat Selan and what this meant for me personally. The cinematographic medium had earlier proven its strength for my engaging with my Baluan family in an intimate, reciprocal, and communicable way. This film has genuinely become their project too. During the production my Dutch father Kees Otto died. This film is dedicated to the continuing afterlives of Kees and Ngat.

CHRISTIAN SUHR
‘On behalf of the living’ is the third film I have made with Ton and his adoptive family on the small volcanic island of Baluan in Papua New Guinea. What attracted me to the project is the people and the long story that Ton has had with them. Baluan is an astonishingly diverse and lively hub for cultural, philosophical, and religious creativity. It is home to around 2500 people from two ethnic groups, who speak multiple languages, and belong to four denominations of Christianity, one of which is locally founded, or practice Bahá’í. In addition, its people adhere to an old but living tradition of speaking with the ancestors. Ton and I recorded our first film together on Baluan Island in 2003. I remember stepping out of the boat and immediately being greeted by Ton’s adopted family. Ton’s sisters were crying, expressing their sorrow over the recent death of their father. Other members of the family encouraged me to film the deeply emotional arrival. Our third film continues the exploration of family relations around and across death by asking what it means to be a part of a world where ancestors are active and can have a direct impact on their living descendants. We explore how Ton as a family member and as an anthropologist relates to all this and how his long-term fieldwork and his relationships on the island influence his understanding of his own place in the world.

GARY KILDEA (editor)
'On behalf of the living’ plays out on two levels; an essay on humanity's preoccupation with life after death and a tale of one anthropologist’s experiment: to take his lifelong ‘participatory’ research on a Papua New Guinea isle to its logical, if counter-intuitive, conclusion. The film is made up of three strands; first, the material that Ton filmed with his parents in Maastricht, where, among other daily concerns, ideas of faith, God and eternity are argued out, 'en famille'. Then there's the main filming on Baluan Island: Christian covers Ton’s reunion with his adoptive family and before long the two find themselves in the middle of some complicated disputes - of the spiritual and the personal kind. The third strand (in a different register altogether) consists of a series of dialogues between Ton and Christian, one on one. In alternating first-person-view, they interrogate and challenge each other with a rare directness. They get right down to the very viability of their experiment - even of the social scientific project, as a whole. This strand functions throughout as a Greek Chorus, a check on the ideas and insights generated out of the main storyline. Whilst probing the realm of the ancestors, the film's primary source and its frame of reference remains the lived experience of those people - mostly family - it embraces with its lens. Though shot by scholar-filmmakers, the work’s open-ended style suggests more the modest curiosity of the dramatist.