We never tell everything, we always keep something for the next anthropologist...

—informant to Margaret Mead   

The film’s point of departure was the question of villager Kaiang Tapior: "Where is your helicopter?" The remark puzzled the filmmaker during his stay at the village of Nimdol in the highlands of the island of former Dutch New Guinea, now called Irian Jaya and part of Indonesia. The question reflected an event which took place in June of 1959, when a crew of scientists including anthropologists and geologists, dropped down from the sky in helicopters—much to the terrified surprise of the villagers who watched in awe at these things out of the sky, the likes of which they had never seen before...

The film critically restages the encounter of this remote village with the outside world, as the sudden arrival of helicopters announced a crucial juncture in its history. ‘Kobarweng’ in Sibil tongue means ‘sound of kobar’ or literally ‘the sound of the helicopter.’ Mainly told through the villager’s testimonies, Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter? reclaims the memory of a colonial past in the wake of Western global imperialism.

Switching the roles of observer and observed, it is anthropology that is depicted as an object of curiosity destabilized by the villager's questions, revealing how ethnography originated as a stepchild of colonialism. It’s the harbinger of an extraction economy, that will bring in PT Freeport, one of the largest global mining operations extracting billions but not giving back to the indigenous population, except for ecological calamities of enormous proportions.