FRIENDS
Norway, Macedonia, 2010, 35 min
Frode Storaas, Elizabeta Koneska
29.01.2011 20:05
Filip is a student at Mac Brod Gymnasium. He stays at the dormitory. Alija is a good friend of him at school. But they relate to different religions and that separate them not only during lunch-breaks at school, but all the time outside school. Filip spends his weekends in his home village Samokov, collecting mushrooms for sale and helping his grandparents and his mother in her small shop. Alija commutes everyday from his home village Plasnica.
The film hints on the situation in Macedonian countryside where unemployment forces people to leave the villages. This situation of dejection shadows the relationships between ethnic and religious groups.
Director, Camera: Frode Storaas, Elizabeta Koneska
As an anthropologist Storaas has worked with pastoralists and agro-pastoralists in Sudan, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. General anthropology, i.e. adaptation, economy and politics, has been his main concern.
As a filmmaker he has been involved in projects in Africa and the Middle East, in Greece and Macedonia, in Mexico and USA, in China and in Norway. A theme conveyed in some of these projects has been magic, how magical beliefs may influence everyday life.
Koneska is a senior curator at the National Museum of Macedonia in Skopje, ethnology department. Her main topics of research and scientific relates to: traditional food; coppersmith and tinsmith crafts; Slavic Orthodox community in Istanbul; Shared Shrines; Turkish and other Muslims ethnic and religious community’s.
Koneska has directed 12 films based on research in Macedonia and Turkey.
Production: Macedonian Centre for Photography, Skopje, Macedonia
Edit: Frode Storaas
Language of dialogues: Macedonian, English
Language of subtitles: Czech, English
In the far, far North, where the day begins and the oceans meet, a small hamlet New Chaplino is situated. The goverment decided to turn the village into a tourist resort. It is winter, 30 degrees Celsius below zero. The tourists are not coming. There are only few memories of them and the snow has already covered their footprints. The village people live in the cardoard houses. They are waiting for the tourists and dancing. It is only Vika, their country fellow, who is coming to visit her native village after she has spent few years in the city. Thus all villagers keep waiting for the tourists and dancing...
This film takes us into the world of old man Peter Sengepov, tha last surviving Shaman of the Kazym River, who lives alone in the depths of the Siberian taiga. The region of the Khanty people is the basic source of oil recovery in Russia. About 70 percent of all Rusian oil is extracted here. The oil companies actively buy huge territories in the North of Siberia. Indigenous people are compelled to leavethese places, their own patrimonial territories, and do a modern civilization gradually absorbs an ancient culture.
