Les Stroud's Beyond Survival

No Westerner has ever been filmed participating in the ancient ritual known as the Devil Dance. Thought to both ward off evil spirits and create a link between worlds, the all-night healing ceremony involves masked dancers imitating demons. Traditional priests practice the ritual both to heal and gain insight from spirit guides, but globalization is encroaching on this cultural practice.

Les Stroud journeys to the coast of Sri Lanka to explore survival methods post–Tsunami including the famed ‘stick fishing’ where Stroud learns to build and stand and fish from a single pole over the ocean. Stroud also travels to the interior to hunt and survive alongside a group that has only been living outside of the caves since the mid-80s. The Vedas.

Poverty-stricken, the Bajau have large families. 12+ people share one room stick huts that poke from the ocean floor like spindly legs on rickety tip-toe. Les will learn how to catch sea cucumber learning the dangerous art of compression diving, and examine life in an area of the world where starfish aren’t your friends, sea urchins rule the ocean floor, and jellyfish leave more than a sting.

Les explores the spiritual, cultural and physical survival of the Bajau. They belong to no country; their allegiance to the sea. They have called the waters of Borneo home for over 200 years and they live, eat, and socialize entirely in a small boat or small ocean stilted hut. Les fishes and makes shelter of braided palm leaves and machete shorn wood.

The Kalahari San practice the ritual of the trance dance as a direct communion to the spirit world, the souls of the Bushmen journeying through space and time to the world of the Ancients to gain insight and healing for their day-to-day survival, individually or for the community at large. Les is the first Westerner to participate in this physically and mentally exhausting three-day trance.

Les travels for two days to reach the San Kalahari tribe and is accepted into the tribe itself. Follow him as he learns the delicate and deadly art of making poison arrows for hunting, tracking porcupine, hiking the great sand dunes of the Kalahari and gathering honey from desert bees.

A female African Shaman - the Sangoma - puts Stroud through a series of rituals to determine where his inner ailments lie. This is achieved through physical scarring and the ingestion of extremely bitter, nausea-inducing herbal medicines. Permanent body markings emphasize fixed social, political and religious roles.

Stroud travels to South Africa to immerse himself in the indigenous culture of the Zulus to explore traditional hunting, deadly stick fighting, and tribal rituals. Stroud meets up with a deadly cobra, a common threat in the everyday life of the Zulu people. A cow is slaughtered in celebration of a marriage where the groom’s family offering falls short of the bride’s family expectation.