This film ‘Guardians of the Flutes’, is an anthropological/ethnographic film about the Sambian people who inhabit the remote east highlands of Papua New Guinea. It was made in 1994 for the BBC. The film shows different rituals and practices that are carried out by the Sambian people and it also shows interviews with various members of the tribe explaining these cultural practices, their beliefs and their lifestyle.
The Sambian tribe are extremely unusual in that they are essentially untouched and uninfluenced by western culture. According to the film, with the modern world steadily encroaching on them, they decided to reveal their secret ritual of initiation. At the time the movie was made, in 1994, there were approximately two thousand people living in scattered villages across the remote mountains of New Guinea, each village based around a group of families. According to the film, Sambian legend records a great war hundreds of years ago. In order to escape the terrible conflict, a small band of warriors fled to the east distant highland valleys where they built fortified villages in the rainforest, this is how they came about. However, soon after, neighbouring…show more content… Their secret rituals of initiation are aimed at making their warriors courageous, brave and strong. We see that Sambians believe that men and women are profoundly different. Girls are seen as tough and they naturally turn into women. Boys, however, need active help to turn into men. At the age of seven, they are taken away from their mothers and initiated into the secret world of the men. The male initiation is highlighted in this film. Young boys undergo severe initiation in order to become men including thrashing, food and sleep deprivation and the swallowing of semen of older warriors. Young warriors live in an exclusively male community in which heterosexual intercourse is forbidden until marriage, as contact with women is thought to sap a warrior’s
