LOS ANGELES – In 2018, a young missionary from the United States made contact with one of the world’s most isolated indigenous peoples in a bid to convert them to Christianity.

It did not go well.

Mr John Chau, 26, had ignored warnings and travelled illegally to North Sentinel Island, part of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Despite a hostile reception from the Sentinelese tribe, he persisted in trying to communicate with them and ended up being killed with arrows, an incident that made news all over the world.

Opening at The Projector on Jan 4, The Mission, a documentary about what happened, uses exclusive interviews, access to Mr Chau’s diary and social media as well as animated sequences to examine whether he was arrogant, delusional or – as the evangelical group which had trained him controversially put it – “a martyr”.

At a screening in Los Angeles in 2023, the film’s Emmy-winning American directors, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, say they want viewers to draw their own conclusions about Mr Chau and his mission, which was also criticised because it risked exposing the tribe to diseases it had never encountered.

“Some people will come into this story with a lot of opinion, a lot of baggage, a lot of feelings about religion or what John had done,” says McBaine, who is married to Moss.

“We have our own opinions, but one of the joys of the film is allowing the audience to form its own opinion.”

On previous projects such as Boys State (2020), a film about a mock government programme for teenagers that won an Emmy for Outstanding Documentary, the couple had plenty of access to their subjects and were able to tell the story “from the inside out”, says Moss.

For The Mission, it was much harder because the main subjects were “someone who’s not with us, and a family and a culture that was very wary and defensive”.

“And we were looking for places of purchase with John, someone who grew up with a faith that we don’t share. That was hard,” Moss says.

They did, however, glean important insights from Mr Chau’s father, Chinese-American psychiatrist Patrick Chau, who denounced the evangelical group which had trained his son as “extreme” and blamed it for his death.

“What really unlocked the potential of understanding John were Patrick’s letters and the emotion of a parent grieving the loss of a child,” says Moss.

“Patrick Chau is a Christian, but he also questioned some of John’s choices. Those were things that so many of us can really connect with.”

The film-makers sought to capture the younger Mr Chau as a complex young man who craved adventure.

McBaine says: “As you see in the film and on his social media, he really was a very accomplished climber and outdoors person, and had read many boys’ adventure books and (the Belgian adventure comics) Tintin.”

Another insight the film-makers had was that “there’s a lot of overlap in terms of his religion and the religion of adventure”, she adds.

“We think of John’s fundamentalist faith as a religion, but it’s a story. John believed in a story, and not everybody believes in that story.

“And part of the journey of the film is to understand that the narratives that we absorb and don’t think of as religion have the same force in our lives and the choices that we as a culture and as a country have made – often at the expense of other cultures,” Moss says.

Looking through Mr Chau’s diary and his overarching plan for the trip, the directors felt strongly that the young man “loved life – he didn’t have a death wish”, Moss says.

“He was willing to risk death to live his faith, but he loved life as much as all of us do.”

• The Mission opens at The Projector on Jan 4.