In an interplay between Hollywood’s cinematic space and the entrapments of a colonial gaze, this haunted landscape renders the strange versus the political. Based on an actual event in the remote highlands on the border of Papua New Guinea with Irian Jaya, a missionary one evening screened the movie classic The Sound of Music (1965) as the whole village and neighborhood scrambled together for a night’s viewing of Julie Andrews swirling through the Swiss mountains.

The archival landscape depicted in this multichannel video eerily collapses into fleeting glimpses of a Hollywood spectacle. Through its cracks we find out that the surrounding mountains shelter the secessionist West Papua freedom fighters (Operasi Papua Merdeka/ Operation Free Papua) forced into hiding by the Indonesian military. The filmmaker, at the time completing his studies in cultural anthropology, stayed at the village during the late 1980s. Thrown in a reversal, it is cultural anthropology that is reframed as a stepchild of colonialism, but turned exotic as the locals attribute the home of the anthropologist to the landscape depicted in the Hollywood dreamworld;—only for the filmmaker to wake up one day staring into the barrel of a machine gun held by Indonesian soldiers.

In the late 1960s the former territory of West New Guinea was annexed by Indonesia in a neo-colonial grab that renamed it as Irian Jaya. Today a global extraction economy, including the Freeport mining company, has displaced the local population sustained by transmigration projects sponsored by the World Bank, that now outnumbers the locals. Nothing of Freeport’s billions of profits flows back to the indigenous islanders, except for ecological calamities.