Keep the River on Your Right - A Modern Cannibal Tale

Director	David Shapiro (II); Laurie Shapiro; David Shapiro; Laurie Gwen Shapiro
Producer	David Shapiro; Laurie Gwen Shapiro
Writer	David Shapiro; Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Artist, anthropologist, and author Tobias Schneebaum spent most of a year living with a tribe in the depths of the Peruvian jungle, during which time he tasted human flesh. Forty-five years later, a pair of filmmakers convinced Schneebaum, in his late 70s, to return to the Amazon to discover if any of these tribesmen still exist. Keep the River on Your Right initially seems like it's going to be a highbrow version of a lurid exploitation flick, but instead it becomes both an astonishing portrait of the charming, gracious, and insightful Schneebaum--a Greenwich Village artist who became an explorer of uncharted realms of the world--and an examination of the vast breadth of human cultures; for example, the documentarians cunningly juxtapose a ritual circumcision in New Guinea with a Jewish wedding in New York, making each seem both strange and familiar. An unusual and fascinating documentary. --Bret Fetzer