Films listed in chronological screening order.uit.no/Content/309895/nafa2012filmcatdes.pdf1 Nafa2012...
Transcript of Films listed in chronological screening order.uit.no/Content/309895/nafa2012filmcatdes.pdf1 Nafa2012...
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Nafa2012 Film Screenings (Tromsø, 23-26 August 2012)
All screenings at Verdensteatret
Films listed in chronological screening order.
Title: Contact
Year: 2009
Length: 78 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Martin Butler/Bentley
Dean
Producer/production company: Contact Films
Country of production: Australia
Country/location of film: Australia
In 1964 Yuwali was 17 when her first contact
with white men was filmed. Her mob of 20
women and children were the last aboriginal
people living traditionally, without any knowledge of modern Australia. Patrol officers were sent to
evacuate their desert home, ahead of rocket tests. Yuwali gives a riveting account of being chased
hundreds of kilometers to escape the ‘devils’ in ‘rocks that move’ (trucks). Now 62, she tells the
story behind this incredible footage
Being screened Thursday 23 August at 14.30
Title: All that glitters
Year: 2003
Length: 33 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Irene Petropolou
Producer/production company: Granada Centre for
Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester
Country of production: UK
Country/location of film: Greece
A cool look at social reality in the balance between
tradition and globalization in the Greek village of
Olympos. In summer, the former inhabitants of the
village leave their countries of adoption to come
back to their roots where, during the glittering festival of the Virgin, they sell handicrafts and the
image of themselves ‘uncontaminated’, in traditional costume. The film shows different points of
view: from the traditional one of the local priest to the economically involved standpoint of the
festival’s organizers; from the mothers, who still believe in certain values, to their daughters, who
scoff at the idea of staying in that little lost village. The tourists, lucky them, believe the fairytale
stage-set and think they are in the place where ‘time stands still’. Being screened Thursday 23 August at 16.30
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Title: The High Cybercafé. Internet ion
the Nepal Himalayas Year: 2012
Length: 28 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Tanel Saimre
Producer/production company: Visual
Cultural Studies, University of Tromsø
Country of production: Norway
Country/location of film: Nepal
Internet and telecommunications have
penetrated the world to a degree of not even being amazing any longer. We take the ability to
connect to people and machines on the other side of the planet for granted. How does this
technology adapt to a mountain village in Nepal, and how does the mountain village adapt itself to
it? The High Cybercafé depicts the lives of two young Nepalis working in a cybercafé in Namche
Bazaar, on the trail to Mount Everest. We see their working day and take a side trip to the computer
lesson at the local elementary school. We witness the change as it happens. Being screened Thursday 23 August at around 17.15
Title: The Honey Hunting
Year: 2011
Length: 14 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Lotta Granbom
Producer/production company:
Department of Social Anthropology,
Lund University
Country of production: Sweden
Country/location of film: Thailand
The Honey Hunting is an ethnographic
film about Musa and his big family
living on the island Ko Lanta in Thailand. Musa lives in a society, which in a few years has become
very popular for tourist to visit. He lives in the only village left on the seaside on the island where
Westerners still haven’t settled. After the tsunami in December 2004, rapid tourism development
impacted significantly on their traditional life-style, a transition into market economy. The increase
in living costs and the decrease in fishing harvest have made Musa find new ways to support his
family. In this film we will follow Musa and his sons collecting honey in the jungle. Being screened Thursday 23 August at around 17.50
Title: Europaland. A Journey into
Popular Cameroonian Imagination
Year: 2011
Length: 30 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Balz Andrea Alter
Producer/production company: Ottou Ottou
André Rodrigue, France
Country of production: France/Switzerland
Country/location of film: Cameroon
Europaland broaches the issue of the image
of Europe of young Cameroonians. Among
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them Europe is both Heaven on Earth and the derivation of the African misery. The film follows the
upcoming Cameroonian Reggae artist Ottou Ottou André Rodrigue taking the viewer on a trip
through the social imagery of Europe as a ‘whiteman’s kontri’ (white man’s country). Being screened Thursday 23 August at 18.45
Title: Sunday in Brazzaville
Year: 2011
Length: 51 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Enric Bach & Adriá Monés
Producer/production company: Fasten Seat Belt
Country of production: Spain
Country/location of film: Congo
A young radio talk host, Carlos La Menace,
unveils in his weekend show three figures of
Congo's capital, Brazzaville. The Sapeur, Yves Saint Laurent, surrounded by extreme poverty,
chooses elegance as a way of life. Cheriff Bakala is not a usual rapper. Finally, Palmas Yaya,
Brazzaville's wrestling champion is relying on voodoo to defend his throne in a crucial moment of
his life... Being screened Thursday 23 August at around 19.30
Title: Parallax
Year: 2011
Length: 58 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Arjang Omrani
Producer/production company: Arjang
Omrani
Country of production: Iran/Germany
Country/location of film: Germany
Parallax is a collaborative docu-fiction
project as a result of a provocative and inter-
subjective series of dialogues between the director and the participants as collaborators. The
outcome is a form of audio-visual interpretation of each collaborator (including the director) about
the concepts of disorientation and displacement. The project is inspired by the notion of ‘shared
anthropology’ introduced by anthropologist/filmmaker Jean Rouch in the 1960s, with attempt to
explore and expand its borders and limits. Being screened Friday 24 August at 14.30
Title: Shooting Freetown
Year: 2011
Length: 29 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Kieran Hanson
Producer/production company: Granada
Centre for Visual Anthropology,
University of Manchester
Country of production: UK
Country/location of film: Sierra Leone
A decade since Sierra Leone's
devastating civil war, from the ashes
rises a new dawn of creativity in audio-visual media. Inspired by Jean Rouch's ‘shared
anthropology’ and ‘ethno-fiction’, Shooting Freetown follows three people forging their way in film
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and music in the nation's capital, facing the constant struggles with vision and resourcefulness. By
incorporating collaborative video projects, their stories give a fresh image of post-war Freetown -
presented to the world through their own lens. Being screened Friday 24 August at 16.30
Title: The well – water voices from
Ethiopia Year: 2011
Length: 56 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Paolo Barberi and
Riccardo Russo
Producer/production company: Paolo
Barberi and Riccardo Russo
Country of production: Italy
Country/location of film: Ethiopia
This is the Horn of Africa, a region of the
world that is periodically shocked by
terrible droughts. Each year, in the dry Oromia lowlands (southern Ethiopia), when the drought
comes, the Borana herders gather with their livestock, after days and days of walk, around their
secular, astonishing ‘singing’ wells. With its strong photography and its epic narration, the film
follows their life during a whole dry season, showing a unique traditional water management
system that allows managing the little available water as the property and right of everyone, without
any money being exchanged. Being screened Friday 24 August at around 17.15
Title: When spirits ride their horses
Year: 2012
Length: 28 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Itsushi Kawase
Producer/production company: Itsushi
Kawase
Country of production: UK/Japan
Country/location of film: Ethiopia
Zar is the possession cult widely spread
in the East Africa and the Middle East. In
Gondar, Ethiopia, the possessed body of the Zar spirit medium is referred to as ‘the horse of Zar'. In
this rhetoric, spirit possession can be understood as the spirit riding the body of the medium. The
ceremonial space has to be “warmed up” by the dance, music and various kinds of smells to awaken
spirits’ power. Spirit possession takes on almost sensuous overtones. The film portrays a woman
who devotes her life to Zar spirits and explores the sensory quality of the interaction between her
and various spirits, including Seyfou Tchengar, who is said to be one of the most powerful spirits in
the region. Being screened Friday 24 August at 19.15
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Title: Koukan Kourcia, the cry of the
turtledove Year: 2010
Length: 62 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Sani Elhadj Magori
Producer/production company: SMAC
Country of production: France/Niger
Country/location of film: Niger, Ivory
Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana
A long journey from Niger to the Ivory
Coast with the meeting of people from
Niger who had been pushed into exile twenty years ago, encouraged by the songs of Hussey, a
professional singer. Today, she travels to visit them, performing a song begging them to return to
their home country. Being screened Friday 24 August at around 20.00
Title: In the light of memory
Year: 2010
Length: 40 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Alyssa Grossman
Producer/production company: Granada
Centre for Visual Anthropology,
University of Manchester
Country of production: UK
Country/location of film: Romania
In the light of memory explores evocations
of memory in post-socialist Bucharest,
nearly twenty years after the fall of
Romanian communism. Cişmigiu Gardens, one of the oldest parks in the city, is a central space
attracting people from all walks of life, a place for social interaction and solitary reflection.
Interweaving recollections of the past with glimpses of present-day scenes from the park, the film
constructs a montage of stillness and motion, images and voices, landscapes and people. Being screened Saturday 25 August at14.30
Title: Quest
Year: 2010
Length: 30 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Ionut Piturescu
Producer/production company: Aristoteles
Workshop, Bucharest
Country of production: Romania
Country/location of film: Romania
Two characters, a carriage and a horse.
Where are they going? Towards what?
Joy, torment, and indefinable music. Vulnerable, yet they do not surrender. They are the poets of
time. Being screened Saturday 25 August at15.30
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Title: Playing with Nan
Year: 2012
Length: 88 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Dipesh Kharel and
Asami Saito
Producer/production company: Jagdish
Kharel, Media Help Line
Country of production: Nepal
Country/location of film: Nepal/Japan
Playing with Nan is the story of a Nepali
young man who migrated to work in a
Nepali restaurant in northern Japan. The film explores his daily life at work and his family at home,
which reflects socio-cultural problems related to globalization. Twenty-eight years ago, Ram was
born in a rural village in Nepal. Working on the farm Ram saw little hope apart from surviving in
the poor conditions. One day he decided to escape from the village and poverty. In Kathmandu he
worked for 12 years at several restaurants. However, he could not change the family’s situation. He
heard a beautiful story from a broker about the work and earning opportunities in Japan. He paid the
broker 20,000 USD to buy a work visa to enter in Japan. He borrowed the money from his relatives
and friends with the commitment of paying back them later with a 20 % interest. Several dramatic
consequences occurred within Ram’s life and his family’s after his migration to Japan. Being screened Saturday 25 August at16.45
Title: The wild ones
Year: 2012
Length: 30 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Lucy Kaye
Producer/production company: Lucy Kaye
Country of production: UK
Country/location of film: UK
Impact Pupil Referral Unit in Bootle,
Liverpool, provides a last chance for
teenagers expelled from school to gain
qualifications. This term, seven pupils get to
leave the Unit to try a new way of learning in an unlikely sanctuary for rescued horses, in the heart
of this run-down neighbourhood. Run by local resident, Bernadette Langfield, several wild ponies
that she saved from being culled need taming. But these horses, like the pupils, have their own
troubled backgrounds, and in order for a relationship between them to develop, both horses and
teenagers have to first deal with their own behavioural difficulties. Being screened Saturday 25 August at19.00
Title: Coffee futures
Year: 2009
Length: 22 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Zeynep Devrim
Gürsel
Producer/distribution company:
Documentary Educational Resources,
U.S.A.
Country of production: Turkey
Country/location of film: Turkey
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Coffee Futures weaves individual fortunes with the story of Turkey’s decade’s long attempts to
become a member of the European Union. Promises and predictions made by politicians, both
foreign and domestic, are juxtaposed with the rhetoric and practices of everyday coffee fortune-
telling. The widespread custom of coffee fortune-telling in Turkey is an everyday communication
tool. Coffee fortunes are both a way of dealing with hopes, fears and worries, and also a way of
indirectly voicing matters usually left unspoken. Like any language, this narrative form has its
protocols, rules and tropes, and yet simultaneously each telling bears distinct marks of the teller’s
personal style and the individual fortune seeker’s condition. Being screened Saturday 25 August at19.45
Title: The Tour
Year: 2011
Length: 38 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Eva la Cour
Producer/production company: Visual
Anthropology Programme, Free
University, Berlin
Country of production:
Germany/Denmark
Country/location of film: Svalbard
(Spitsbergen), Norway
The Tour explores the relationship
between actual and virtual realities
within and across Longyearbyen on Svalbard, by touring the place with Maxi Taxi, one out of two
taxi companies in the Norwegian settlement, and its employees. A verbal montage, based on three
taxi drivers from Norway, Denmark and Russia, illuminates the role of the individual as a
simultaneously conserving and creative agent. A more general concern of the film is thus how
experience and mediation of place happen, simultaneously, as actively generative forms of
emplacement. The structure of the film, a guided tour, reflects Longyearbyen as a particularly
accessible and well-infrastructured location in the Arctic, characterized by mobility and
temporality, evoked through a reflexive usage of the distinctive expressive structures embedded in
the relationship between image and sound. Being screened Saturday 25 August at20.15
Title: Awareness
Year: 2010
Length: 67 minutes
Director/filmmaker: David & Judith
MacDougall
Producer/production company: Fieldwork
Films, Canberra
Country of production: Australia
Country/location of film: India
Filmed in South India at Rishi Valley
School, founded by the 20th Century
Indian thinker Krishnamurti, Awareness explores the sensibilities of two groups of young Indian
teenagers, a group of girls in their dormitory and a group of boys in theirs, as they live out their
daily experiences at the school. The two groups were filmed separately by David and Judith
MacDougall during their stay at the school over a period of several months. The film highlights
gender differences at this critical stage of adolescence and demonstrates how Krishnamurti’s
encouragement of individuals’ awareness is played out at the school. With humour and attention to
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the processes of learning, the film provides an insight into education at one of the leading
progressive schools of the Indian Subcontinent. Being screened Sunday 26 August at14.30
Title: Fidim pikpik (Feeding the pigs)
Year: 2012
Length: 5 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Peter I. Crawford and Jens Pinholt
Producer/production company: Intervention Press,
Aarhus
Country of production: Denmark
Country/location of film: Solomon Islands, Reef Islands
In some of the diverse cultures of the Pacific, especially
in Melanesia, the pig is the most important domesticated
animal. It is predominantly used for ceremonial purposes
such as in funerals, weddings, and age-set rituals. Several
of the films in the long-term Reef Islands Ethnographic Film Project thus show the killing of pigs in
conjunction with such events, at times giving a somewhat disturbing impression of human-animal
relationships, particularly for audiences used to see meat only wrapped in cellophane at the local
supermarket. In this short film a mummy, daddy, and their little son go out to feed their pigs,
conveying the impression of an altogether different human-animal relationship, one of tenderness,
care, and love, whilst also showing how children learn through awareness of animals, nature and
technology. Being screened Sunday 26 August at15.45
Title: Broscatu: The Storyteller
Year: 2011
Length: 62 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Mihai Andrei Leaha
Producer/production company: Triba film,
Cluj Napoca
Country of production: Romania
Country/location of film: Romania
“Once upon a time there was a poor man…”
A biographical anthropological video-
documentary, which focuses on Ion Roman
(Broscatu), a fifty-years old storyteller from Chelinţa, Maramureş. Broscatu is a broomstick maker,
a family head, a sociable and religious person and an ex convict. The film explores the various
types of stories that Broscatu tells to the author, his relationship with the filmmaker and also the
meta-reflexive relation between Broscatu and his own film. The stories, move from fairytales
towards intimate life stories confessions, to the storyteller’s opinion about the film, in which he just
acted.
The film tries to address a question: how can stories be meaningful for anthropological research and
how can we explore a person throughout his relationship between camera, stories and film process? Being screened Sunday 26 August at16.30
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Title: Carmen
Year: 2011
Length: 4 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Olatz González Abrisketa
Producer: Olatz González Abrisketa
Country of production: The Basque Country (Spain)
Country/location of film: The Basque Country
A black sock, white thread, a needle, a thimble and a
plea: Santitum zaina urtu, zaina bere lekuen sartu,
which, in a mixture of Latin and Basque, means to
Carmen “Santitum (?), dissolve the vein, put the vein
into place”. This is the full extent of her treatment for
the healing of sprains, which has to be repeated 3 times, on different days. Healing rituals live on in
the Basque Country, a place where magical practices have been transmitted from woman to woman
for generations. For the time being, Carmen has no successor. Being screened Sunday 26 August at17.45
Title: Men of words
Year: 2009
Length: 23 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Johanne Haaber Ihle
Producer/production company: Granada
Centre for Visual Anthropology,
University of Manchester
Country of production: UK
Country/location of film: Yemen
Men of Words explores how an ancient
tradition of exchanging poetry on the
Arabian Peninsula is still used as a means to discuss contemporary social and political issues in
Yemen. The film touches upon issues such as the social meaning of words in Yemen, circulation of
the spoken word, and verbal art as a way to obtain freedom of speech in a country that faces a bleak
future dominated by poverty and political instability. Being screened Sunday 26 August at18.15
Title: Skolliales
Year: 2012
Length: 30 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Haukur Sigurdsson
Producer/production company: Visual
Cultural Studies, University of Tromsø
Country of production: Norway
Country/location of film: Iceland
Wild eider ducks come back year after year
to the same nesting grounds, areas where
they know they are safe from predators. In Dyrafjordur, a remote fjord in north-west Iceland, a
group of gentlemen dedicate more than two months out of the year taking care to protect these
ducks. In return they get to keep the valuable eiderdown that the ducks provide for their nests. The
duck's main predator is the arctic fox, Iceland's only native land mammal. The foxes come down
from the hills and into the fields during the bright arctic nights. The eider farmers, the Grand
General Committee as they call themselves, are ready to fight the sly fox with old jeeps, guns,
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home-made poetry, and cakes. Skolliales is the story of two eider farmers and neighbours, Valdimar
and Zófonías, and their friends. Between the men, the ducks, and the arctic fox there lies a special
connection. A relationship that goes beyond love and hatred, a relationship that is based on
understanding, respect, and friendship. Being screened Sunday 26 August at19.00
Title: Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit
Year: 2012
Length: 61 minutes
Director/filmmaker: Paul Gurrumuruwy,
Fiona Yangathu, Jennifer Deger and David
Mackenzie
Producer/production company: Miyarrka
Media
Country of production: Australia
Country/location of film: Arnhem Land
Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit shares
the sorrows and joys of Christmas in
Australia’s northeast Arnhem Land. Yolngu Christmas rituals start in October when the first wolma
thunder clouds form, heralding the coming wet season. As the distant rumbling triggers memories
of lost loved ones, quiet tears start to flow. So begins a season in which stories brought by
missionaries in the mid-20th century provide the basis for celebrating the cycling transformations of
life, death and rebirth – and for claiming the enduring place of the ancestral in the contemporary
world. Manapanmirr is a Yolngu expression that refers to a state of being joined or brought
together. The film explores this theme in form, content and effect. What begins as an experiment
with using digital media to “connect cultures through feeling”, as director Paul Gurrumuruwuy puts
it, becomes through the very process of image-making a catalyst for vision, innovation and
connection for Yolngu themselves. Being screened Sunday 26 August at19.45
Programme edited and compiled by Peter I. Crawford (University of Tromsø). Film selection
and programming by the NAFA 2012 Film Selection Committee: Anna Laine (Sweden), Ditte
Marie Seeberg (Denmark), Jan Ketil Simonsen (Norway), Roger Canals (Catalonia/Spain)
and Peter I. Crawford.
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