Chau took part in missionary trips to Mexico, South Africa, and Iraqi Kurdistan. He spent a lot of time online posting about missionary history, as well as the modern version. People who shared his obsession read his posts avidly. They saw him as an aspirational figure. He was so popular that he became an “influencer,” posting about certain gear and rations for paychecks. Chau was killed in 2018 during an illegal missionary trip to the Sentinel Islands off of the coast of India, in the Andaman Islands archipelago. That’s where Chau tried to endear himself to a community of 200 believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe on Earth. The tribe resisted Chau’s attempts to communicate with them. He kept hanging around and trying again until they shot him dead with an arrow.
One could take many angles on what Chau’s life and death “meant.” Werner Herzog often turned colonialist behavior into ghastly comedy with a sprig of cosmic bafflement (“Aguirre: The Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo”), and it isn’t hard to imagine what he might have done with Chau’s story. Martin Scorsese explored the contradictions and absurdities of missionary work in 2016’s “Silence,” portraying Portuguese Jesuits in Japan as sunny-side-up Travis Bickles. There was a same-titled 1986 Roland Joffe film about Spanish Jesuits defending a local tribe against Portuguese slavers. Though visually and aurally spectacular (Ennio Morricone’s score is a cathedral unto itself), it was a confused movie, seeming to view missionary work and Christian conversion of hunter-gatherers as innately good and noble enterprises without considering the possibility (explored in other films and countless books) that the Spanish Jesuits and the Portuguese were engaged in variants of the same activity.
The biographical lead-up to Chau’s mission is fascinating because it shows the formation of a young mind. We see ordinary male bonding get custom-tooled by religion to the point where Chau and his two closest buddies make a pact to “watch out” for each other and prevent straying from the moral and righteous path (one of the filmmakers gets one of Chau’s friends to admit that the pact was mainly about not watching porn, which they all did anyway).
A few details are glossed over or elided in a way that creates mystery, such as the tidbit about Chau’s father, Patrick Chau, a psychiatrist, getting into trouble for improperly prescribing thyroid medicine to patients. The suggestion is that the ensuing scandal damaged the boy’s image of his father, who was Christian but saw the more extreme Evangelical sects as frightening and perhaps led him down the path that eventually brought him to the island. But it’s not presented that simplistically. It is just a thing that we, like the filmmakers, now wonder about. (Patrick Chau has blamed “extreme Christianity” for his son’s death.)