Papua’s Cry Reaches Rome: ‘Indonesia’s New Colonialism’ Exposed

ROME — It was not just a film screening.

Inside a modest hall in Rome on Saturday (May 9, 2026), a documentary about Papua transformed into something closer to an indictment — not only of Indonesia’s development policies, but of the institutions accused of remaining silent as one of the world’s oldest rainforests is dismantled in the name of progress.

Pig Feast: Colonialism in Our Time, directed by investigative filmmaker Dandhy Dwi Laksono and Papuan filmmaker Cypri Jehan Paju Dale, stunned an audience of priests, nuns, and Catholic religious communities with a devastating portrait of what the film calls “modern colonialism” in Papua: the seizure of indigenous land, the destruction of sacred forests, and the militarization surrounding massive state-backed food and energy projects.

By the end of the screening, the question hanging in the room was no longer about development.

It was about complicity.

“Where is the Church,” several participants asked during the post-screening discussion, “when indigenous Papuans are losing everything?”

Produced over two years between 2024 and 2025, the documentary journeys deep into the ancestral territories of the Marind, Yei, Awyu, and Muyu peoples in southern Papua. Their forests — once central to spiritual life, hunting traditions, and communal identity — are now being carved apart by bulldozers clearing land for palm oil, sugarcane, and biofuel plantations.

The film points to an estimated 2.5 million hectares of land across Merauke, Boven Digoel, and Mappi slated for industrial expansion under Indonesia’s national strategic projects. Environmental groups and indigenous advocates have repeatedly warned that the scale of deforestation in Papua could become one of Southeast Asia’s largest ecological transformations in decades.

But Pig Feast is less interested in statistics than in human grief.

One of its most haunting scenes shows indigenous men carrying timber through a dying forest to erect a massive red cross. It is not presented merely as a Christian symbol, but as an image of sacrifice — Papua’s forests crucified for economic ambition.

The title itself refers to the sacred pig feast tradition practiced by Papuan indigenous communities, a ceremonial expression of kinship and harmony with nature. In the film, that tradition becomes a metaphor for a disappearing world.

The most explosive remarks came from Bishop Bernardus Bofitwos Baru, OSA, of Timika, whose comments electrified the audience.

In language both theological and political, he accused the state of becoming “part of the crime itself,” comparing government indifference to Pontius Pilate washing his hands while injustice unfolds.

Even Church leaders, he warned, risk becoming “Judases” if they remain silent while indigenous communities are displaced.

The statement triggered visible discomfort — and reflection — among attendees in Rome. Several clergy members questioned why parts of Indonesia’s Church hierarchy appear more willing to preserve political harmony than openly confront what activists describe as systemic dispossession.

Neutrality, some argued during the discussion, is no longer neutral when entire communities are being pushed from ancestral land.

The documentary arrives at a delicate moment for Indonesia, which has aggressively promoted downstream industries, food security initiatives, and green energy investments as pillars of its economic future. But Pig Feast forces audiences to confront the moral contradiction beneath those ambitions: can “green development” still be called progress when it erases the people who have protected the land for generations?

For many in the room that night in Rome, Papua ceased to be a distant geopolitical issue.

It became a test of conscience.

And the cry rising from the forests of Papua, amplified thousands of miles away inside the heart of Catholic Europe, sounded less like a regional protest than a warning to the world.

(Sources: Veritas Indonesia, UCA News, Pig Feast Screening Report 2026, Greenpeace, WALHI)