First Contact

Aroview: The first part of the dir.'s 'Highlands Trilogy' about the recent history of the New Guinea Highlands combines period and contemporary footage to chart the "first contact" and subsequent interactions between indigenous villagers and three European explorers in the 1930s.

Searching for gold, the explorers found a community of around a million people who had previously had little contact with the outside world. One of them - Michael Leahy - married into a local tribe, and his son was the subject of the next part of the trilogy.