Film title: On Behalf of the Living

Film makers: Ton Otto, Christian Suhr, Gary Kildea, 105 min, 2023. In Tok Pisin, Paluai, Danish, Dutch and English, with English, Spanish and Polish subtitles

Venue: Hedley Bull Theatre 1

Date: Friday, 17 October 2025

Time: 6:00pm for 6:30pm start

The film screening will be followed by a Q&A session with one of the film makers, Professor Ton Otto

On Behalf of the Living unfolds on two levels: an exploration of humanity’s preoccupation with life after death and the story of one anthropologist’s experiment—taking his lifelong “participatory” research on a Papua New Guinea island to its logical, if counter-intuitive, conclusion.

The film is composed of three strands. The first includes footage that Ton Otto filmed with his parents in the Netherlands, where discussions of faith, God, and eternity are argued out ‘en famille’. The second strand takes place on Baluan Island, where Christian Suhr documents Ton’s reunion with his adoptive family. Before long, the two find themselves entangled in complex disputes —both spiritual and personal. The third strand, in a different register altogether, consists of a series of dialogues between Ton and Christian, one-on-one. Through alternating first-person perspectives, they interrogate and challenge each other with rare directness, questioning the very viability of their experiment—and even the anthropological project as a whole. This strand functions as a Greek Chorus, providing a check on the ideas and insights emerging from the main storyline. While probing the realm of the ancestors, the film’s primary source and frame of reference remain the lived experiences of the people—mostly family—that it embraces with its lens.

Speaker: Ton Otto, born in the Netherlands, is Professor of Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Aarhus. He has conducted fieldwork in Papua New Guinea since 1986 with a focus on issues of social and cultural change. Since his first fieldwork he has used video as part of his research and teaching but also as a means of exchange with the people he collaborates with in his studies.

A preview of the film is available here.

An interview with Ton Otto can be found here.

This event is supported by ANU School of Culture, History and Language and the Pacific Institute at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.