Screenshot/Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme Di Zaman Kita
The West Papua film’s viral reach is a direct result of official attempts to stop it, drawing renewed international attention to conditions in a region that Indonesia has largely closed to independent observers, foreign journalists and international human rights bodies.
The documentary
“Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme Di Zaman Kita,” which translates into English as “Pig Feast: Colonialism in Our Time,” is directed by journalist Dandhy Laksono and anthropologist Cypri Jehan Paju Dale. The film documents the impact of large-scale food estate and bioethanol projects in South Papua province on indigenous land rights, forests, and traditional livelihoods.
It takes its title from the Atatbon, a traditional pig feast ceremony of the Muyu people and neighboring communities in South Papua. This is a ritual that binds clans to their land, their ancestors and to each other, and that depends on intact forests for its survival.
After opening with a depiction of the ceremony, the documentary shows the arrival of barges carrying hundreds of excavators into indigenous villages under military escort. The diggers have been sent to clear forests for the government’s National Strategic Projects, the government’s program of large-scale development concessions in Papua.
The film tracks how up to 2.5 million hectares of customary forest are being converted into industrial zones for sugarcane bioethanol, palm oil and food estate production. It also documents a form of land defence in Boven Digoel area, where Awyu community members have planted more than 1,400 red-painted crosses in their forests to mark ancestral land as off-limits to industrial clearing.
Screenings disrupted or cancelled
The 96-minute film was circulating through campus screenings and community discussions in early May 2026 before a wave of cancellations and forced dispersals followed, as reported by Indonesian newspaper Tempo.
On May 7, a screening at the University of Mataram was halted by the deputy rector, Sujita, who told local media the film was unsuitable for students. The following day, military personnel from the 1501/Ternate Military District Command reportedly shut down a screening in Ternate, North Maluku.
Screenings were also cancelled at Mandalika University and UIN Mataram, and a screening planned for May 16 at Padjadjaran University in Bandung was denied permission.
Coordinating Minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra denied issuing any formal ban, pointing to campuses in Bandung and Sukabumi where screenings proceeded without interference, according to The Straits Times. He claimed that the cancellations arose from individual institutional decisions rather than a government-wide directive.
Former President Megawati Soekarnoputri, chairwoman of the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, was quoted as saying that she cried after watching the film. “That is the reality,” she said, calling for respect of indigenous customs and land rights in Papua.
A region under pressure
West Papua, at the far eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, has been under Indonesian administration since 1962, 13 years after Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands. The Netherlands had governed West Papua separately from its other colonial territories, and the handover provoked widespread protests that gave rise to an independence movement still active today.
Indigenous Papuans are almost entirely Christian, while Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.
Since 2021, the Awyu people, an Indigenous community of about 27,300 people living in the rainforests of southern West Papua, have opposed the development of palm oil plantations on their ancestral lands. A lawsuit filed in 2023 against plans by a Malaysian palm oil company to clear 26,326 hectares of forest was rejected by Indonesia’s Supreme Court in November 2024.
Greenpeace estimates that clearing the primary forest within the concession area would release about 23 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to about five percent of Indonesia’s projected annual carbon emissions in 2030. Environmental groups argue that converting the forest to a palm oil plantation would reduce biodiversity and alter the ecological functions currently provided by the forest.
President Prabowo Subianto, after taking office in October 2024, accelerated an existing program targeting up to three million hectares of land in Merauke for rice and sugarcane production. In November that year, the Papuan Council of Churches and the Association of Native Catholic Priests warned that land acquisitions were leading to the decimation of Papuan communities and the destruction of rainforests.
Even Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights has warned that the National Strategic Projects have had “various serious impacts on the implementation of human rights, including civil and political rights, economic, social and cultural rights, as well as collective rights and the rights of vulnerable groups.”
A worsening displacement crisis
Military operations in Papua have intensified alongside the expansion of development projects. Between April 12 and 15, Indonesian army operations were carried out in Pogoma and Kemburu in Papua’s highland interior, involving ground troops and air attacks. Several villages were directly affected.
According to the Papuan Council of Churches, the number of internally displaced persons in West Papua rose to more than 107,000 people in April 2026, up from 85,000 the previous year, as CSI reported. The Council warned that the situation was becoming “increasingly alarming,” due to food shortages, inadequate protection and severely limited access to healthcare.
CSI’s local partners recently visited newly displaced communities in Nabire, on West Papua’s northern coast, and collected testimonies from families who fled fighting in the Papua Highlands. Agulina Wonda told CSI’s partner that a military task force had conducted door-to-door operations searching for men to interrogate. “There were cases of wrongful arrest where people were shot, killed, and buried right beside civilian homes,” she said.
Mirena Kogoya, also from the highlands, told CSI’s partner that three young men including her nephew were shot by armed forces in May 2025, and that a local district head was subsequently burned alive inside a traditional Papuan round house. When Mirena and her husband returned home in July believing the situation had stabilized, they found themselves under military surveillance. On October 15, armed forces burst into their home at night and opened fire on people gathered there for a church inauguration event.
Government called to account
At the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 25, 2026, CSI’s Joel Veldkamp noted the rapid increase in displaced persons and called on the Indonesian government to facilitate a visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and to extend invitations to relevant UN Special Rapporteurs.
The World Council of Churches made the same call at a parallel event it hosted on March 4 at the Human Rights Council. “Access and transparency. That’s what we’re calling for from the Indonesian government,” said Peter Prove, the WCC’s Director for International Affairs, addressing an Indonesian government representative who attended the event.
The Indonesian government has rejected these calls. At the 58th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Indonesia’s delegation denied that indigenous peoples in West Papua face “structural racial, political, economic, social, and cultural discrimination and other coercive measures.”
Writing in a commentary for CSI, Cypri Dale, co-director of Pesta Babi and one of the documentary’s primary researchers, characterized this as a “diplomacy of denial” that “has enabled ongoing impunity for state and corporate actors involved in hazardous practices of dispossession and exploitation.”
Indonesia is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees freedom of expression, the right to peaceful assembly, and protection from arbitrary deprivation of property.
The disruption of film screenings by military personnel and university administrators, alongside the killing and displacement of civilians in Papua, raises serious questions about compliance with these obligations. The government’s refusal to permit independent monitoring makes verification of conditions on the ground effectively impossible.
