Plot Summary:Every year, a ritual known as ida is performed by the Umeda people, who inhabit the dense primary forest of the Waina-Sawanda district of West Sepik, Papua New Guinea. Ida, the central social and cultural drama of the Umeda, is a fertility ritual, in which a dominant theme is the metamorphosis of the cassowaries. An ethnography by anthropologist Alfred Gell, Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries, complements the film.
Until recently the Umeda people of the West Sepik performed an annual ritual, the ‘ida” which dramatized their relationship to the forest and celebrated the continued survival of the tribe. The film serves to preserve this “doomed cultural tradition”