Sukundimi Walks Before Me

Where a river’s rights become a people’s fight.

The Sepik River is the mother line for Papua New Guinea communities. Winding through mountains and rainforests, she is the crucial vertebrae connecting and supporting the region’s rare biodiversity and spiritual consciousness. But her livelihood and her communities are threatened by the proposal of a copper-gold mine being built near at her headwaters, which could extract, erode and pollute an environment that she has sustained for millennia.   The children of this river, led by Manu Peni, create a grassroots campaign to stop the mine from being built, resisting the forces of colonial bureaucracy and Western narratives of ‘development’ by invoking the Spirit of the river and indigenous knowledge.  Sukundimi Walks Before Me, explores this existential fight through lyrical expressions of existence, resistance and life along the mother river.

This film is supported by RNZ, Screen Inc, Pacific Islanders in Communications (PIC), the Shark Island Foundation, the Three Springs Foundation, Screen Australia and VicScreen.

This film won the Best New Zealand Director category, and received a special mention for the Best New Zealand Feature category at the Doc Edge Awards 2026.