Thursday, March 12 · 7:30 p.m.
Max Bell Auditorium, The Banff Centre, $9,
Mountain Culture members free
Tickets available through The Banff Centre Box Office or at the door
The Last Nomads, a film that tracks Canadian linguist Ian Mackenzie deep into the endangered Borneo rain forest in search of one of the world’s last remaining hunter-gatherer cultures, will be presented in The Banff Centre’s Max Bell Auditorium March 12. The HDTV screening will be followed by a slide show by Mackenzie on what has happened to the disappearing world of the nomadic Penan since the making of the film.
Every year, Mackenzie treks through the shredded remnants of the Borneo rain forest, looking for the last of the nomadic Penan. In The Last Nomads, Grand Prize winner at the 2008 Banff Mountain Film Festival, Mackenzie goes back to Borneo with filmmaker Andrew Gregg to document his travels through a series of Penan settlements, moving closer and closer to the last reported nomadic camp, where it is said that the chief has been driven mad by logging and where Ian fears he will see his final glimpse of a vulnerable and ancient people he has come to care about deeply.
Mackenzie has spent a cumulative total of two years living with this hunting and gathering people, the majority of time in the company of forest nomads. His original contact with them was to help them in their struggle, but over the years his interest has deepened to include the study of their language and culture. With degrees in linguistics from the University of British Columbia and the Université de Montréal, Mackenzie has spent years compiling the first dictionary of the unique Penan language. The dictionary is a work in progress, and will remain so as long as Mackenzie continues his relation with the Penan; its most recent edition defines and exemplifies more than 15,000 lexical items with 700,000 words of text.
