Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale

Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale is a 2000 documentary film about the travels of anthropologist/artist Tobias Schneebaum, directed by filmmakers David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro. It takes its title from one of his books, Keep the River on Your Right, but covers material from several of Schneebaum's other books and articles. In the film, Schneebaum, by then an elderly man, revisits two cannibal tribes—one in Papua New Guinea and the other in the jungles of Peru—with whom he'd lived several years each as a young man. He and the film-makers manage to locate a few of the individuals he had known well during those periods. Schneebaum is remarkably honest about his same-sex relationships with members of both tribes, his childhood fetishizing of cannibalism, and his actual tasting of human flesh with one group. His extensive training in art allowed him to bond with different cultures he studied around sharing carving and painting techniques.