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My Year with the Tribe

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Factual: Life Stories

Writer Will Millard visits the treehouse-dwelling Korowai tribe in Papua, Indonesia.

Writer Will Millard visits the treehouse-dwelling Korowai tribe in Papua, Indonesia, to try and understand the pressures they face as they move into the modern world.

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My Year with the Tribe: Series 1

Will Millard

Will Anderson

Gavin Searle

KEO Films Ltd

My Year with the Tribe: Series 1: Episode 2

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Episode 2

Series 1

BBC Two - My Year with the Tribe, Series 1, Episode 2

Will Millard returns to the Korowai to spend more time with two old men in the forest.

Will Millard returns to the treehouse-dwelling Korowai to spend time with two old men living in the forest, but is shocked by what he sees when he arrives.

Living in treehouses and using stone tools, the Korowai were only discovered living in the jungles of West Papua around 40 years ago. Since then they have had to adapt rapidly to the ways of the outside world. Writer and adventurer Will Millard visits the Korowai four times over the course of a year, to see if he can get closer to them than is usually possible, to better understand the pressures they face as they leave the forest behind and transition into the modern world. He also wants to find out how much of their traditional hunter-gathering lifestyle still exists. What he finds shocks, surprises and confounds him, as he witnesses the last gasp of an ancient way of life which once defined us all.

Will returns for his second trip to the Korowai to spend more time with Haup (White Beard) and Halap. They are some of the last remaining Korowai still living permanently in a treehouse without any real contact with the outside world. When Will first meets them, their adopted son August is there with them in the forest, and his wife Amel gives birth one night, cutting her own umbilical cord with a sharpened piece of wood. But it soon turns out that they spend most of their time in the government-sponsored villages six-hours walk away, and have decided to come to the treehouse to see if they can work with the film crew. So Will asks them to return to their government-built village, preparing to spend 10 days living with Haup and Halap alone in the middle of the forest.

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