Return to the lost Eden

"Following a boisterous journey on a local rundown fishing boat I landed on the long yearned Siberut island in the Mentawai archipelago, 90 miles west of Sumatra, Indonesia." In 1969 Adriano Zecca, then 24 years old, wrote brief notes on his travel journal on his incredible adventure in one of the most mysterious and less known places on earth. This extraordinary experience, shared with an almost uncontaminated indigenous community, marked the beginning of his job as a documentarian. In July 2019, after half a century of travels, reportages, and documentaries, fulfilling a career which led him to the most remote parts of the world, the Italian director is left with a haunting question from the past: What happened to the small island of Siberut and to the "flower people" inhabiting it? This documentary is an attempt to answer that question but, above all, it is the story of an emotional return journey and of an existential balancing of a lifetime. Fifty years on Adriano Zecca traces back his first trip together with his family; his wife Magda, Spanish painter, and his two sons Eloy and Raúl, a cinematographer and an anthropologist respectively.