Tribe

The Matis people of the Amazon are finding their place in the world just forty years after first contact with the West. As with many isolated cultures, first contact was a devastating experience. Around 60 percent of their population was wiped out by common western diseases to which they had no immunity. Bruce joins the Matis for a month in their village in the remote Vale of Javari, in the Western Amazon, near the border with Peru. They live in a highly protected indigenous reserve surrounded by an almost impenetrable border of red tape. Bruce learns to be a Matis hunter, undergoing a series of tests to toughen him up -- he's whipped with sticks, has excruciatingly painful tree sap dropped into his eyes to improve his vision, learns to hunt monkeys with a 12-foot blow-pipe and finally takes a powerful frog toxin to purge his system. This, inevitably, is a brutal process. Bruce is burnt with smouldering arrows on his upper arms and the blistered skin is smeared with frog toxin. Bruce is then free to join the men on a real hunt, rampaging through the forest in search of wild pig and spider monkey.

Bruce joins a brigade of Nenet reindeer herders on the remote Yamal Peninsula in Northern Siberia, for their annual winter migration. The brigades follow their vast herds of reindeer (8,000 animals) south as winter pushes down the peninsula. There is a timeless beauty to this bi-annual movement of people. The Nenets live entirely off their reindeers, moving their skin tents every other night as the herds move to new pastures. For more than a month, Bruce wore reindeer skin clothes, ate reindeer meat and drank reindeer blood. In one of his toughest expeditions yet, Bruce and a small team lived with a Nenet brigade for around six weeks, eating and travelling as they did. The brigades travel over 400km in the permanent twilight of the Arctic Autumn. Temperatures reach 40 degrees Centigrade below and blizzards scour the landscape.

Bruce lives with the Akie people of Tanzania. The Akie are hunter-gatherers who live on the African plains. They hunt with small bows and poisoned arrows, forage for food and raid bees nests in huge baobab trees for highly prized honey. The Akie are one of the few Savannah-based hunter-gather groups left in Africa. Unlike their neighbors, the Masai, they own no cattle and so rely completely on their landscape for food and shelter. They are a secretive people, feared for their magic and their mystical relationship with their environment. Their story is one of survival -- their traditional hunting grounds are being taken by big game hunters and it is becoming increasingly difficult to kill enough meat for their families. Bruce joins the increasingly hungry Akie as they seek to live off the land and kill a kudu. Bruce is forced to face his biggest fear and put his hand into a bees nest to gather wild honey.

Bruce sails to the island of Anuta, a tiny, remote tropical outpost in the South Pacific. It is one of the most isolated communities on Earth -- 75 miles from its nearest neighbor (four days sailing). Due to its extreme remoteness, Anuta is one of the most intact Polynesian cultures remaining on earth. Two hundred and fifty Anutans inhabit a beautiful island just a half mile wide. They are an ocean-going culture, still capable of navigating great distances by the stars. The men fish with hand lines from traditional out-rigger canoes for sharks and marlin. They dive on the reef for lobster and collect shellfish at low tide. The women cultivate every available patch of land with taro, manioc and bananas. To the Western eye it looks like paradise -- white beaches, turquoise sea, swaying palm trees. But what is life like for the people who inhabit paradise? Bruce spent six weeks finding out.

Bruce treks for ten days into the high mountains in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan where he stays for a month with the isolated Layap people. They are devout Buddhists and yak herders, cut off from the outside world for half the year by deep snow. Bruce lives a life of unrelenting hardness, herding with the men in the high pastures and wrestling yaks to the ground to push salt into their stomachs, struggling for breath in the thin air at over 17,000 feet. It is a spiritual journey for Bruce, as the community's astrologer reads his birth chart and tells him he's an emotional disaster, and his destiny is to be re-incarnated as a monkey. Bruce studies the four noble truths and ultimately learns a lesson of humility after an epic three-day attempt to drive his yak train across a snow-covered pass in the high mountains.

Bruce travels to Sarawak, Borneo, to live with the Penan people. The Penan are nomadic hunter-gatherers whose forest home is in the process of being cut down around them. It is an intensely personal journey for Bruce, who has longed to make this film ever since he travelled through Borneo as a young man. The journey takes him deep into the forest in search of the last nomadic Penan. As the forest recedes around them, many Penan have been forced to abandon their traditional way of life and settle in government-built villages. But deep in the jungle, the last Penan are still living as they have for thousands of years, hunting wild pigs with blow pipes and moving silently through the trees. The journey proceeds without government permission as the authorities are hostile towards anyone telling the story of the Penan.