New documentary tells story of missionary who was killed trying to convert world's most isolated Indigenous peoples
Topics: News, Film and TV, Life
Niamh Shackleton
Featured Image Credit: National Geographic/YouTube
Topics: News, Film and TV, Life
A new National Geographic documentary will look into the death of young missionary, John Allen Chau.
In 2018, John set out on a mission to travel to a remote part of India - North Sentinel Island.
The island is where a group of isolated Indigenous peoples live and the young missionary went on an one-man expedition in the hopes of converting them to Christianity.
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But John didn't receive a warm welcome from the group, who killed him on his third attempt to get on the island.
He was just 26-years-old.
The Sentinelese are said to have fired arrows at him on his previous attempts as a warning, but John chose not to listen despite the group having 'a history going back tens of thousands of years of violently repelling anyone who steps on their island'.
Journalist Alex Perry told NPR back in 2019 while discussing John's death: "To some extent, what he got was predictable."
But he went on hit out at those who had no empathy for John's passing as he wasn't 'a sort of imperialist colonialist'.
Perry wrote an article about John in Outside magazine four years ago, and now National Geographic are looking into his life and death in further detail.
Directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the documentary film 'explores the death of American missionary John Allen Chau, who was killed by arrows while attempting to make contact with one of the world's most isolated Indigenous peoples'.
The film features interviews with those close to John, with one friend saying that what the late 26-year-old did was 'stupid and courageous'.
McBaine and Moss also had access to John's diary and video archives to help them create the programme.
As well as going through John's diary to see what he was thinking, The Mission 'examines the mythology of exploration that inspired him'.
Doubling down on this, Moss told Deadline: "There were a lot of headlines in the immediate aftermath of John’s death, but I think the collision of these two forces of John and everything that he represented and this tribe that we knew almost nothing about, suggested that there was more to the story.
"And that was the opportunity for us to take on with this film is to really explore… what put John on this path and how did he come to the fate of dying on this island."
The Mission hits US cinemas tomorrow (October 13) followed by a UK release on 17 November.