First Contact
Directed by
Produced by
  • Robin Anderson
  • Bob Connolly
Narrated byRichard Oxenburgh
Cinematography
Edited by
  • Martyn Down
  • Stewart Young
Production
company
Arundel Productions
Distributed byRonin Films[1]
Release date
7 December 1983
Running time
58 minutes
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish

First Contact is a 1983 Australian documentary film by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson which recounts the incursion of gold-prospecting Australians into the unexplored interior highlands of New Guinea in 1930, then inhabited by a prosperous native population numbering in the region of one million. It is based on the book of the same name by the same authors. Inhabitants of the region and surviving members of the Leahy brothers' gold prospecting party recount their astonishment at this unforeseen meeting. The film includes both moving and still pictures taken by Michael Leahy, leader of the party, and contemporary footage of the island's terrain.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.[2] It won Best Feature Documentary at the 1983 Australian Film Institute Awards.[3]

The Highlands Trilogy

First Contact is the first documentary in what later became known as The Highlands Trilogy. The other two films are Joe Leahy's Neighbours (1989) and Black Harvest (1992). These three films, between them, have won some thirty major awards, including each film winning both the Grand Prix at the Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris and AFI Award for Best Documentary.[4]

Joe Leahy's Neighbours and Black Harvest pick up the Leahy story started in First Contact but in the next generation with Michael Leahy's mixed-race son, Joe Leahy, and his family. These two films document Joe Leahy's life as owner and manager of two coffee plantations on land acquired in controversial circumstances from the Ganiga tribe. Much of the drama in the two films stems from the implications and expectations of these two plantations, that is, from conflicts about ownership both within the Ganiga people and between the Ganiga and Leahy. The films chart a society in transition from a tribal life to a Western capitalist one.

Reception

In Cinema Papers, Barbara Alysen called First Contact "an entertaining film about a series of historic meetings - selective, as most accounts are, that is as much drama as conventional documentary".[1]

Box office

First Contact grossed $120,000 at the box office in Australia.[5]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Alysen, Barbara (June 1983). "First Contact". Cinema Papers. No. 43. p. 165 – via Research Online, University of Wollongong.
  2. ↑ "First Contact". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times. 2010. Archived from the original on 14 May 2010. Retrieved 15 April 2010.
  3. ↑ AACTA. "Past Winners: 1983 Winners & Nominees". Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts. Retrieved 27 June 2014.
  4. ↑ Michael DVD Reviews
  5. ↑ Film Victoria - Australian Films at the Australian Box Office Archived 23 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading


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