Pig Feast: Colonialism in our time
New documentary about the Indonesian government’s human rights and environmental abuses in West Papua.
The Indonesian government is currently carrying out the world’s largest deforestation programme. It’s taking place in West Papua, which has been subjected to Indonesian military occupation for more than 60 years. Currently there are 56,000 Indonesian troops in West Papua.
In 2025, the Papuan Church Council reported that there were 103,000 internally displaced persons in West Papua.
Indonesian government has deployed thousands of troops to Papua to force through the destruction of 2.5 million hectares of forest for industrial food and biofuel plantations. 1.3 million hectares will become rice fields. 560,000 hectares will produce sugar and bioethanol. 400,000 hectares will become palm oil plantations to produce biodiesel. A further 380,000 hectares will be used for cattle ranching.
A new film, “Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme di zaman kita” (Pig Feast: Colonialism in our time) documents the destruction of the forests and the resistance by Indigenous communities.
The film is directed by Dandhy Laksono and Cypri Dale. Dandhy previously directed “Sexy Killers,” a film about the coal mining industry in Indonesia, and “Dirty Vote,” about the 2024 presidential election. Cypri is an anthropologist. He is a research fellow at CSEAS Kyoto University in Japan and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
Several organisation collaborated in the production of the film, including Watchdoc, Ekspedisi Indonesia Baru, Yayasan Bentala Pusaka, JubiTV, Greenpeace Indonesia, and Legal Aid Institute of Papua Merauke.
The film is deeply shocking. The scale of the destruction is vast. Indigenous communities have lost their land, forests, hunting grounds, and livelihoods. Fertiliser and herbicides sprayed onto the industrial crops run off into rivers polluting the water that villagers previously used.
On 22 May 2026, the film was posted on YouTube where it has been watched more than 9.7 million times.
The film starts with the Awyu community in South Papua. They are building an enormous wooden cross in the forest. The red-painted cross is one of more than 1,800 that communities have built over the past 10 years as a form of resistance against the Indonesian government’s destruction.
One of the villagers explains:
“We believe that if we are unable to resolve a problem, in this case preventing a company from entering our land, we ask for help from our ancestors and God. On the crosses we inscribed or drew the attributes of war that are meant to show that we strictly prohibit anyone from entering or disturbing our territory. If anyone breaches these signs, or threatens or ancestral land rights we are prepared to fight a war.”
The first that Indigenous communities knew about the government’s plans for their forests was when ships docked in their villages carrying hundreds of excavators along with the Indonesian military.
The film-makers uploaded the film to YouTube after the Indonesian military targeted several screenings of the film in Indonesia. Screenings were disrupted or cancelled in several cities.
On 7 May 2026, a screening at the University of Mataram was stopped after deputy rector Sujita said the film was not suitable for students. “This film is not fit for screening,” Tempo reported Sujita as saying. “It is better to watch football together.”
The following day, a screening in Ternate, North Maluku, was dispersed by soldiers.
According to Rettet den Regenwald, which will show the film in Germany and Switzerland in September 2026, 30 screenings were banned around the country.
In a statement, Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, Usman Hamid, said,
“The series of bans and forced dispersals of screenings of the film ‘Pesta Babi’ in several regions of Indonesia not only shows the government’s anti-criticism stance, but also reveals the state’s efforts to suppress any alternative information that exposes systematic human rights and environmental violations in Papua. This is clearly an attempt to silence and suppress critical voices about Papua, as expressed through the film ‘Pesta Babi’.”