KORIAM’S LAW… AND THE DEAD WHO GOVERN
KORIAM’S LAW is set in the Jacquinot Bay area of Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province. Here the Australian anthropologist Andrew Lattas meets the philosopher-informant Peter Avarea of Matong village, Pomio. Motivated by their dialogs, the film sets out to put the often misunderstood cultural phenomena, the “cargo-cult” in a universalising light.
The Pomio Kivung Movement was founded in 1964 by a local leader called Koriam. In the face of official condemnation its political and religious philosophy sought to uncover that path to a perfect existence which the colonising whites seemed to have found and selfishly monopolised. Kivung leaders scrutinised the revelations of missionaries for hidden truths and codes. They examined, too, formes of colonial governance - especially money and bureaucracy for clues to the source of their power. Koriam’s central problem was how to find a way back from the original ancestral fault that surely put his people in this subjugated state in the first place. He incorporated parts of Christianity whilst seeking an ever closer embrace of the beloved dead, imploring them to hasten their return so that the deprivations and humiliations of racial inequality might end. KORIAM’S LAW concerns itself with the contemporary works and understandings of the Pomio Kivung. The movement’s leaders are keen to show its mission is to prepare the way for the devoutly wished “change” and, at the same time, to organise for a better society in the here an now.