A Papuan chef at the University of Rouen
A Papuan chef on the benches of the University of Rouen (Seine-Maritime), this is enough to arouse the curiosity of the public who came in large numbers on the evening of Monday May 2 to the Mont-Saint-Aignan campus (Seine-Maritime) to discuss with Mundiya Kepanga, accompanied by the photographer and French director Marc Dozier.
On the occasion of the Festival Les AnthropoScènes, organized from April 29 to May 15 by the Tangram, the Evreux National Stage (Eure), the two men indeed took part in a series of meetings around their documentary entitled “ tree brothers which evokes the fight of Mundiya Kepanga, head dressmaker of the Huli tribe in Papua New Guinea, born in the mid-1960s, to preserve his own environment, but who also fights against global deforestation and global warming.
“When I was invited to COP 21 in Paris in 2015, me, a little chef, who can neither read nor write, in the midst of all these great chefs, I said to myself that I had to testify, make a film that tells what happened at my house. Based on a prophecy from my ancestors who says that if all the trees die then humans will die too, ”says the man who travels the world to get his message across. And even occasionally meets Robert Redford, also involved in the environmental cause.
For Rouennais, Mundiya Kepanga and her headdress decorated with feathers are far from unknown. In 2012, he himself gave the city’s Natural History Museum one of his traditional adornments, already accompanied by Marc Dozier, his essential translator, with whom the relationship of friendship has lasted since the beginning of the 2000s. A meeting that changed his life and introduced him to the Western world. This clash of cultures had already given rise to a tasty feature film, “Inverted Exploration”, and had made this mischievous character known to as many people as possible.
Today, the Papuan chief has taken on a more militant dimension, close to that of the Amazonian chief Raoni with whom he has already exchanged on several occasions. Or that of the Amazonian cacique Yvanice Tanoné, from the Brazilian people named Kariri Xocó, who will come this Saturday, May 7 to the Gallo-Roman site of Gisacum near Évreux to celebrate a ceremony of thanks to Mother Earth.
“If everyone in their village, their city, their province, takes an initiative in favor of the planet, it could have an impact”, wants to believe Mundiya Kepanga for whom the members of his Huli tribe in Papua New Guinea “feel pride”, as he finds when he returns to the country: “They bring me many questions about the way you live, sometimes for days and nights. And it is my role to answer them. A visibly reciprocal interest…