Trobriand Cricket

Since English missionaries introduced the game of cricket there at the turn of the century, the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea have developed their own variation of this archetypical British sports, that does justice to their cultural history. For example, the game has taken the place of traditional and ritual warfare. The teams, consisting of twelve players each, have been replaced by the entire community, often numbering more than forty people. They also added so-called ‘chants’, that are in fact comments on recent events. Apart from a lot of stock footage, trobriand cricket - an ingenious response to colonialism particularly contains shots of the Trobriand cricket itself. The film was made by Jerry Leach and Gary Kildea at the request of a local political movement, that also funded the production.