TAWAI: A Voice From the Forest (2017)

5
Free to Stream
Unlimited streaming
Buy $10
Stream + download anytime

Tawai is a word the nomadic hunter-gatherers of Borneo use to describe the connection they feel to their forest home. In this dreamy, philosophical and sociological look at life, Bruce Parry (of the BBC's Tribe, Amazon & Arctic) embarks on an immersive odyssey to explore the different ways that humans relate to nature and how this influences the way we create our societies.

From the forests of the Amazon and Borneo to the River Ganges and Isle of Skye, Tawai is a quest for reconnection, providing a powerful voice from the heart of the forest itself.

The film shares the Penan and the Pirahã's ways of living, providing great inspirations and reflections on what kind of society we can create.

The Penan are the last resilient groups who practice a particular social organisation. They don't have a concept of material property. All that exists in nature has been created for nature to enjoy. All creatures have equal rights to nature.

From their point of view, the idea of property is an ideology, which some human beings have created but is not legitimate, unacceptable. It is sacrilege to what has been created for all. The accumulation of property is seen as a waste.

We haven't always been competitive and aggressive. It's a very recent product of our acquisitive property-based societies, which are a product of the Neolithic, when we started to domesticate animals and crops.

Our shift from a hunter-gather lifestyle to farming only started about 10,000-12,000 years. This likely precipitated a decline in social equality, as food excess was stored and created a means of accumulating wealth and power.

That's where the whole question of power hierarchy got inculcated in what we think of as civilisation, but actually, it's a very young, short-lived and probably suicidal social organisation for humanity. Our enduring social form is the egalitarian one.

The way we experience reality affects how we organise the world around us. Would we behave differently if we could hear what nature is saying like we all once did?

We must learn how to rebalance our inner world and expand our capacity. Empathy beyond our family and friends, to all peoples, all species on the planet which supports us." - Dark Matter Labs

www.tawai.earth
Trending Videos
Schooling the World (2010)
66 min - If you wanted to change an ancient culture in a generation, how would you do it? You would change the way it educates its children. The U.S. Government knew this in the 19th century when it...
Nordic Animism | A Conversation with Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen
60 min - Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen is a Historian of Religion, Ph.d from Uppsala University in Sweden. His research into Afro-diasporic strategies for maintaining animist reality in the modern world has led...
Sicko (2007)
123 min - The words "health care" and "comedy" aren't usually found in the same sentence, but in Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore's new movie 'SiCKO,' they go together hand in (rubber)...
Our Food is Killing Us
25 min - In this video essay, I examine the causes and destruction of our current industrialized food system. Specifically, I dive into the capitalist commodification of food, and how most of the...
Trending Articles
Emotional Literacy
Human Potential and the Path Back to Indigeneity
Feminism
* Recommended

Hi there.

I bet you've seen some great "films for action" that aren't in our library yet. 

Why not add that documentary or video directly to our library? Half of our best content was added by members. Submissions just need to be non-fiction, embeddable (like from Youtube or Vimeo), and related to activism or changing the world in some way. 

Here are some more tips on adding videos. We'd love you to become a regular contributor! 

Cheers,
The Films For Action team