Tribal warfare in the academic jungle.
What happens when western anthropologists descend on the Amazon and proceed to make one of the last 'unacculturated tribes' on the planet, the Yanomami Indians, the most exhaustively filmed and studied tribe on the planet? The film is an acute study of the clashing of these two tribes, the wars amongst them and uncovers horrendous secrets long buried.
The 1960s. Seeking adventure, they thrust themselves into dark, mysterious places on the planet… They were young men, fresh out of college, seeking change and adventure. The anthropologists from France and America. They rejected their own cultures’ rites of passage, instead being drawn to exotic climes to make their own. They took a PhD or a film camera and a sense of academic mission with them. They sought out dangerous and unknown tribes to live with and study. They broke with their own cultures, in order to lose themselves or find themselves in others.
How could ‘science’ go so wrong?
The field of anthropology goes under the magnifying glass in this fiery investigation of the seminal research on Yanomami Indians. In the 1960s and ’70s, a steady stream of anthropologists filed into the Amazon Basin to observe this “virgin” society untouched by modern life. Thirty years later, the events surrounding this infiltration have become a scandalous tale of academic ethics and infighting. The origins of violence and war and the accuracy of data gathering are hotly debated among the scholarly clan. Soon these disputes take on the tones of a Heart of Darkness as they descend into stories of sexual and medical violation. Director José Padilha brilliantly employs two provocative strategies to raise unsettling questions about the boundaries of cultural encounters. He allows Professors accused of heinous activities to defend themselves, and the Yanomami to represent their side of the story. As this riveting excavation deconstructs anthropology’s colonial legacy, it challenges our society’s myths of objectivity and questions the very reason for this discipline to exist.
In his film company dokumentar.no Lie has since 2008 been working as a film director, cinematographer and producer for documentaries. He works with the new Canon EOS 5D/7D with HD film, and edits in Apple's Final cut.
With Haiti mon Amour (Kjære Haiti, hva nå?) Lie went to Port-au-Prince after the earthqake with Ole Paus and others. We followed the money collected by the norwegian consert Dugnad for Haiti and NRK, and then given to Red Cross, Church Aid and UNICEF. It is edited as a low budget film essay, an montage of images. (se video below)
He has since 2007 worked on a documentary portrait – The Seduced Human – Jørgten Leth and Haiti on the danish renowned filmmaker Jørgen Leth (2011). This one-hour documentary is financed so far by the Norwegian Film Institute with 720 000 kroner – and will be released in 2011. (se video below)
Lie is also editor-in-chief for DOX, the leading European quarterly magazine for documentary films, published by the European Documentary Network. See PDFs of the last magaines below.
Lie has been the editor-in-chief and publisher for Morgenbladet between 1993-2003, and has been editor-in-chief/publisher of the Nordic edition of the monthly newspaper Le Monde diplomatique between 2003-08, where he now is still the publisher and regulary film critic.
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