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John Chau’s death in 2018 made headlines around the world: an evangelical young man killed on an island in the Andaman Sea inhabited by an isolated Indigenous group. Chau came to North Sentinel Island bearing a waterproof Bible and dreams of converting the North Sentinelese to Christianity, but his ill-fated mission ended in a hail of sharpened arrows.
Five years after Chau’s fatal endeavor, National Geographic is releasing The Mission, a documentary about Chau’s life, violent death and the ethical questions raised by his attempt to Christianize a people well known for repelling attempts by outsiders to contact them. Emmy-winning directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss join Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss their film, which premiered in late August at the Telluride Film Festival.
“[John Chau] was living his faith in a very radical way,” Moss tells Doc Talk. “He trained for 10 years to get to North Sentinel Island. He was an intelligent, thoughtful, methodical, passionate young man, and his journey ended tragically. And that’s where we took up the story. I think we wanted to look behind the headlines.”
The filmmakers reveal the insights they gained from a diary Chau left behind, and from writings by Chau’s father in which the elder Chau suggests his son’s expedition amounted to a fantasy, one based on a colonialist interpretation of spreading Christianity. McBaine and Moss also get into how they unpacked National Geographic’s history of applying a Western lens to Indigenous peoples over many decades.
That’s on the latest edition of Doc Talk, a podcast co-hosted by Oscar-winning writer-director John Ridley and Deadline’s Documentary Editor Matt Carey. Doc Talk is produced by Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios, with support from National Geographic.
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