South Sudan became the world’s newest country in July 2011, following a referendum that ended one of Africa’s longest and most brutal civil wars. The euphoria didn’t last. By December 2013, the country had descended into civil war again, this time along ethnic lines, as forces loyal to President Salva Kiir clashed with those of former Vice President Riek Machar, drawing the Dinka and Nuer peoples into a conflict that would kill an estimated 300,000 people and displace millions more.
Misha Somerville made People of the Earth, Wind and Fire in the brief window between independence and catastrophe. His subject was the Dor Dinka — a branch of the Dinka people, one of the largest ethnic groups in South Sudan, whose way of life has remained rooted in pastoral tradition for centuries. Cattle are central to Dinka society, not for commercial profit or meat, but as the foundation of ritual, ceremony, marriage and community. Boys receive ceremonial scarring on their foreheads as a rite of passage into adulthood, submitting to the marks in silence as proof of their manhood. Their spiritual life is grounded in a belief system that observers have described as almost constituting its own religion, with a creation story, rituals surrounding birth and death, and a belief in a single god known as Nhialic.
It is a culture of extraordinary depth and one that the world’s media rarely reaches. Somerville’s film is not a journalistic report. It is a photo documentary that moves quietly through everyday life, capturing moments of dignity, resilience and routine in a place that had known very little peace. Shot before the outbreak of the 2013 civil war, it documents a way of life that was about to be violently disrupted — giving the film a significance that only becomes clearer with time.
