A short documentary about Felix Tololiu, Mount Kawatak, and the knowledge, labour, and responsibility through which an Indigenous Minahasan person protects the living world.
A Film by Kalfein Maikel Wuisan
The Guardian of Kayobaan
Tou Akel: The Guardian of Kayobaan follows Felix Tololiu and his relationship with Mount Kawatak in Minahasa, North Sulawesi. The film observes how environmental protection grows from daily practice, ancestral knowledge, memory, and a responsibility to sustain life for the community and future generations.
Logline
Felix Tololiu protects Mount Kawatak through knowledge and practices inherited across generations, showing how the survival of land, community, and human life remains inseparable.
Synopsis
Protecting Mount Kawatak
Felix Tololiu lives close to Mount Kawatak and carries knowledge shaped by long relationships with land, plants, water, forest, work, and community life.
The film follows the ways Felix protects the mountain and maintains practices needed for the survival of life around it. Environmental care is not presented as a separate project or campaign. It is part of everyday responsibility.
Through Felix’s experience, Tou Akel connects ancestral knowledge with biodiversity, livelihood, Indigenous identity, and the continuing protection of Minahasan territory.
Tou Akel
People, Seho Trees, Saguer, and Knowledge
The title is connected to people whose knowledge and working lives grow around seho trees, saguer, Cap Tikus, land, and the relationships sustaining those practices.
The film places labour beside ecological responsibility. Knowledge is carried through the body, through repeated work, through memory, and through attention to the condition of the surrounding landscape.
Felix Tololiu
A Life Connected to the Mountain
Felix is not presented as an isolated environmental hero. His work belongs to a longer history of Indigenous knowledge, livelihood, and responsibility toward territory.
Mount Kawatak is not merely a background to his story. The mountain is a place of life, work, memory, biodiversity, and continuing obligation.
Key Themes
What the Film Brings Together
Ancestral Knowledge
Knowledge inherited across generations informs how Felix understands land, work, plants, and responsibility.
Biodiversity
Protecting Mount Kawatak also means protecting the many forms of life sustained within and around the mountain.
Livelihood
Environmental protection remains connected to work, food, family survival, and local economic life.
Future Generations
The responsibility to protect the mountain extends beyond the present and includes the lives still to come.
Film Information
Project Details
Full Title
Tou Akel: The Guardian of Kayobaan
Format
Short documentary
Duration
6 minutes
Released
August 2022
Location
Minahasa, North Sulawesi, Indonesia
Featured Participant
Felix Tololiu
Filmmaker
Kalfein Maikel Wuisan
Project Support
If Not Us Then Who?
Emerging Filmmakers
Indigenous-Led Storytelling
The film was released through the If Not Us Then Who? Emerging Filmmakers programme, which supports Indigenous filmmakers in bringing stories of land, biodiversity, identity, and community responsibility to wider audiences.
Watch the Film
Watch Tou Akel
The full six-minute film and additional project information are available through If Not Us Then Who?