![]() ![]() The most interesting side of the affair arrives stealthily in the final sequences, when Biju Baruah draws some moral conclusions about humankind’s natural propensity for war and conquest and its tragic consequences. At the missionaries’ insistence, the heads of their enemies were buried in the ground. When missionaries arrived and began to convert the population, the hunters resisted longer than others before eventually being baptized. Later, the toothless hunters show where they stacked human heads on a log “lok drum” in a communal building called a morong. “I wish I could kill more,” cries Chingchok. Longwa, who is 81, twice went headhunting and Mannyam, 84, claims to have killed four people. The hunters demonstrate chopping their victims with machetes and cutting off their heads. ![]() In his feature debut Last Headhunters of the Nagas, which had its world premiere at the Mumbai Film Festival, young filmmaker Aryan Biju Baruah provides an in-depth portrait of the few remaining old-timers who are still alive today and who seem anxious to pass on their knowledge of tribal culture before it’s too late. Up until the 1960s, when a combination of the Indian government and Christian missionaries put a stop to the practice, the hunters of Nagaland on India’s border with Myanmar viewed anyone not from their own village as the “enemy” and on occasion killed them, cutting off their heads with machetes and bringing them back to the village to proudly exhibit. ![]()
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