Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale

In 1956, Tobias Schneebaum took a bite of human flesh, and though that is but a small morsel of his story, he has been living that moment down — and also dining out on it — ever since. In the one of a kind documentary Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, filmmakers David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro track down the septuagenarian Schneebaum, a wizened, sad eyed sprite of a man — think Yoda as rabbi — who recalls his experiences among the Indians of South America with a weirdly voluble, I went native so sue me open mindedness that renders his story as compelling as it is bizarre.

Schneebaum was a 34 year old Jewish New Yorker who’d enjoyed some reknown as a painter when he was seized, in the ’50s, by a desire to cut himself off from Western civilization. He wandered into the Peruvian jungle and got himself adopted, as a kind of honorary soul brother, by a naked tribe of Amarakaire Indians, with whom he ate, slept, and bonded (the pathologically mild Schneebaum had, until then, barely come to grips with his homosexuality). Goaded by the filmmakers, he returns to Peru and meets some of his old compatriots, a reunion with the past that makes Tobias Schneebaum seem one of the luckiest, or maybe the loneliest, people who ever lived.