In 2016, Gordon Peake answered a job advertisement to work with the government of Bougainville, a group of islands on the eastern fringe of Papua New Guinea looking to strike out as a country of its own.

This was sometimes not the energetic state building project he imagined. So instead he spent his spare time travelling with former rebels, seeking out death metal bands, and awakening the spirit of a dead anthropologist from his alma mater to create an unforgettable portrait of this potential nation-in-waiting.