Tawai: A Voice from the Forest

I wasn't expecting to come out from seeing the film with a sense of being lost....lost because of the way we are losing this world, of what we are doing to our planet, to each other. It is as if human beings have forgotten the connection to earth, to grounding, and how we just are making life so complicated for ourselves. I loved the simplicity of the tribe, with no-one in charge and everyone is equal, a novel idea to us in the west with our cut throat ideas. I have recently held an exhibition called Home/Beit, asking Palestinians where or what Home is to them, one of the responses we had from a Bedouin elder was about a tree, it has roots and if those roots aren't planted in deep enough soil it will never thrive. We just don't have our roots planted deeply enough within nature to thrive fully. One of my comments I said during today's q and a, was that this should be showed everywhere, especially in schools. To me it is a must see. I am left with a sense of yearning for something I can't quite put my finger on, but what I do know is that I have to make changes in my life to have a knock on effect for people I will probably never ever meet, but possibly share some form of DNA with. Like Bruce, I had that connection of 'oneness' in India, it was quite overwhelming and profound...life can never be the same after that. Thank you for this film.

Tawai: A Voice From The Forest is a documentary worth watching, just to understand there are still people or tribes living in harmony with nature, far away from civilization or at least what we think it is to be civilized. I thought it was an interesting view on how those people live in the Maleysian forests of Borneo. Forests that are destroyed for our own selfish way of life, for things we don't realy need, or at least for things where there are alternatives for, like palm oil for example. The most interesting part to me were those people in Borneo, as for the religious and spiritual part of those meditating people in India I found that lesser interesting. The documentary won't change anything though, big corporations will continue cutting down every single tree there is if there is a profit to make. Governments are all responsible as well as money is the only thing they are interested in, and certainly not a bunch of indigeous people living from the forest. A well done documentary that make you think about the consequences of the continuous deforestation of our planet. Worth watching if you still dream about a better world.

This documentary is not bad per se. The drone flights are a bit of an overkill and the shaky handheld frames are just the way they are. But that is not the main critic. The way Bruce Parry tries to explain the world and its downward spiral towards globalization and claiming to have found a safe haven in a few simple cultures. However, the mentioned cultures in this documentary would also not be sustainable once blown up to continental or even global scale. There would simply not be enough environmental space for billions of people living the same life-style. Bruce Parry keeps on repeating the same mantra over and over again like if he had found the key to all problems of our civilization.

Hypocritical at best.

3/10: Not really worth your while.

Tawai

A beautiful, haunting and most welcome opportunity to tune in to how the remaining few real egalitarian hunter gather societies relate to each other and their surroundings. How they live and breathe that connection and inter-relatedness, how their way of life keeps them so tightly in touch with the present moment, with each other and the soil on which they step. An insight into what we lose when we fall out of that interwoven way of life and most of all, an invitation to allow in and fully embody the heavy aching pain and frustration that our own daily actions are chipping away at these precious last living examples of true human harmony with nature. Chipping away at the resources that are the lifelines of our planet.

It is pain that we really need to face, fully open to and deeply feel. We owe it to these societies and we owe it our planet and to ourselves, to witness and be present to this process of destruction that is happening to us as one global unit.

Tawai means to feel a sense of connection to our surroundings, in a way like how a baby is connected to a mother and her breast. To know with its whole being that it needs her, that it feeds upon her and will not be able to survive without her and her love.

This is yet again Bruce parry's finest hour.he has brought to us the simple yet wonderful life of panan people ,also there struggles of being forest people and having to addapt there way of life to suit foreigners coming in and destroying the forest for material and monetary gains ,I'm actually very moved and sad and happy that we have fabulous people that show us the true meaning of life Thanks from the bottom of my heart Bruce for making this simply wonderful movie.