Papua's more than 1,400 islands sit in the transition zone between Indonesia and Oceania, a scatter of volcanic peaks and coral atolls that sailors once called accursed, fearing the head hunters and cannibals said to live there. Cameras follow the Tolai people through initiation rites that test how much pain a teenager can bear before he is allowed to fish and paddle a canoe alone; those who do not flinch receive a string of shells marking the passage to adulthood. The canoes themselves, painted and carved, turn out to matter as much for belief as for transport, tied into local ideas about death and the afterlife. The film also sits in on puri-puri ceremonies, black magic rituals performed with masks and fetishes meant to open a channel to the dead. Alongside the ritual life is something more unexpected: villages that play their own version of cricket, matches that run eight to ten hours and double as an outlet for a warrior temperament with no other target left.