BIKPELA BAGARAP
(Big damage)
The Human Face of Logging in Papua New Guinea
A film by David Fedele (43mins / 2013)
David Fedele is an independent documentary filmmaker, musician, composer, explorer and dreamer; always striving to push boundaries with his art.
David mainly works alone, self-producing and self-funding his own projects, outside of any existing system or industry.
For the past ten years he has been traveling the globe with a video camera in his backpack, mainly documenting humanitarian, environmental and social justice issues, in a self-taught style which he calls “cinematic journalism”.
FILMMAKER
making the film
David’s films have explored such diverse topics as sub-Saharan African migration in North and West Africa, electronic waste (e-waste) in Ghana, chronic kidney disease due to pesticide use in Sri Lanka, and illegal logging in Papua New Guinea, and have been screened widely, including at the European Union in Brussels (Belgium), winning numerous awards.
He is currently working on a new film called THIS JUNGO LIFE, documenting the lives of Sudanese refugees and asylum seeker living and sleeping on the streets of Rabat, Morocco.
David was selected to participate in Berlinale Talents as part of Berlin International Film Festival in 2014. He has also been a jury member at the Cinema Planeta International Environmental Film Festival in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and President of the jury at the SREM International Environmental Film Festival in Serbia.
David self-distributes his films, with a strong focus on grassroots, independent and community screenings and he shares all of his films and music for free online.
David spent three months alone in Papua New Guinea at the start of 2011, shooting this film. He was based in Vanimo town, Sandaun Province, less than 50km from the border with West Papua / Indonesia. This is one of the most remote parts of PNG, accessible only by plane or boat.
From Vanimo, he travelled extensively into the jungle visiting remote villages and exploring current and past logging operations, as well as two of the main logging camps in Sandaun Province – Maka Basecamp and Amanab 56 Basecamp.
The only way to access these areas was via the logging roads themselves, traveling on the vehicles of the logging companies. Traveling with just a small hand-held camera and a local guide, it was essential to keep as low a profile as possible, due to the sensitive nature of the project.
To avoid the suspicion of the logging companies and their employees, David couldn’t stay in the logging camps or villages for more than a few days at a time, making it difficult to follow particular characters throughout the film.
So instead, he decided to combine the stories of different people into a narrative that could be followed, to give as many and varied people as possible the opportunity to be heard and have their stories told.
