They wanted to make an exact replica of the rafts the Inca people had used, so they based their design on the sketches from the early Spanish conquistadors.

He found five Scandinavian comrades who believed in his theory and together they made their way to Peru where they began to plan the crossing of the Pacific Ocean. “If the wind, the current and the waves come from the east, then the people must have come from that direction as well.” He confidently stated and this soon became his life’s purpose: he wanted to prove that the first Polynesians arrived from South America. So as such, they should have come from the west, but the more Thor looked to the east, the more he thought that maybe the anthropologists had got it wrong. However, the commonly held theory at the time was that the Polynesians migrated from Asia.

He listened to the old men telling stories about the god Tiki, who came from the sea, ‘where the sun rises’. He could not help but notice that the wind and waves were coming, relentlessly, from the east. In one of his books he describes how he sat for days on its eastern shore watching the waves crashing onto the cliffs. He travelled frequently to the South Pacific and even lived for a while on the Marquesan island of Fatu Hiva. The mastermind behind this famous undertaking was Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian anthropologist who took a great interest in Polynesia and its origins. One of the greatest of these is surely the story of the raft Kon-Tiki. The whole film is black and white, shot on a single 16mm camera.Ī small amount of color footage of Kon-Tiki does exist.The history of the sea is peppered with many stories of great seamanship and inspired journeys. Thereafter it is a film of the crew on board, shot by themselves, with commentary written by Heyerdahl and translated. The movie has an introduction explaining Heyerdahl's theory, then shows diagrams and images explaining the building of the raft and its launch from Peru. The Academy Film Archive preserved Kon-Tiki in 2013. The Oscar officially went to Olle Nordemar. The movie, which was directed by Thor Heyerdahl and edited by Olle Nordemar, received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 1951 at the 24th Academy Awards. Kon-Tiki is a Norwegian documentary film about the Kon-Tiki expedition led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in 1947, released in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark in 1950, followed by the United States in 1951.

Kon tiki 1947