The short documentary Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter? (1992) deals with the history of a remote village in the highlands of New Guinea. The videotape assembles archival footage and oral histories depicting the first encounter between the Irian Jaya people and the scientific crew, including anthropologists, of the Dutch Star Mountains Expedition. The confrontation with the crew and their helictopter caused a shock that threw the worldview of the villagers upside down. The event even entered their Sibil-tongue language; literally translated, weng means language, whilst kobar airplane. Kobarweng's title is an ironic reference to a question first posed to Grimonprez by a local man named Kaiang Tapor, who, upon Grimonprez's arrival in the village of Pepera after a three-day hike, asked him where his helicopter was. The footage in the film is traversed by a running band of script, reporting observations and remarks culled from anthropologists' interviews, eye-witness reports, and the reminiscences of those highlanders who recall those moments of 'first contact' between the white intruders (missionaries, prospectors, anthropologists, adventurers) and the local inhabitants: We never tell everything, we always keep something for the next anthropologist they are candid enough to admit to Margaret Mead, while another wit remarks: We called the whites 'people of soap', but their shit smelled the same as ours. Switching the roles of observer and observed, the relation implied in the anthropological representation is reversed: the desire of the observing anthropologist itself becomes other, exotic, an object of curiosity destabilised by the villager's questions. According to Grimonprez: