3.-4.3.2020
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF MOVIES
WITH ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEMES

THE LAND OF LOVE

Estonsko, 2016, 78 min
Liivo Niglas
04.03.2020 19:00

"The Land of Love" is a documentary film about reindeer, oil, politics and poetry. It tells a story about Yuri Vella, a Forest Nenets reindeer herder and poet who lives in the taiga of Western Siberia, and who tries to prove that one person can stand against the great power that is destroying the environment of the native people. Vella calls the "Land of Love" a piece of the forest tundra where each autumn his reindeer mate. The same area is a favoured hunting ground for employees of Lukoil, a company that pumps oil in the region. For many years already Yuri has tried to chase the Lukoil people away from the "Land of Love" because the noise of cars and rifle shots and the ruckus caused by boozing oil workers disturbs the mating of reindeer. Yuri uses several unusual resistance methods to chase the oil workers away, including filming the intruders and writing poems on the subject. 

Liivo Niglas is currently a research fellow at the department of ethnology in University of Tartu, Estonia. He runs an independent production company, Mp Doc, for anthropological documentary films. He has made films in Siberia, Africa, Central Asia and North America. Some of his works are: The Brigade (2000), Yuri Vella's World (2003), Adventure High (2004), Making Rain (2007), Fish On! (2008), Itelmen Stories (2010), Journey to the Maggot Feeder (2015).

Director, Camera, Script, Edit: Liivo Niglas
Production: F-Seitse & MP DOC

Language of dialogues: Russian, Khanty, Forest Nenets, French
Langue of subtitles: Czech, English

Launching of the movie, awards:
The National Estonian Film and Television Award for the best documentary 2016; Annual Award of the Estonian Cultural Endowment for the best documentary 2016; 1st Prize (Man and Nature), Matsalu Nature Film Festival, Estonia

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq6JYJysHWc

IN THE DEVIL'S GARDEN

Alžírsko, Švýcarsko, 2018, 25 min
Pavel Borecký
03.03.2020 17:30

The film situates the viewer within the makeshift space of an animal market in Algeria. Drifting between feeding and waiting, one attunes to the bodies of goats and camels, the oldest companions of Arab men. As we move deeper into the desert, the site turns into a sacrifice zone and reveals its dark geopolitical secrets. The sensory ethnography film will invite you to question the banality of displacement, confinement and exploitation in an out-of-sight territory.

Pavel Borecký is a social anthropologist, non-fiction filmmaker and social innovator. He co-founded an award-winning research organization "Anthropictures", carried out diverse projects in Serbia, Peru, Estonia and Czech Republic, and produced several ethnographic films. Being based at University of Bern, he currently investigates tactics of managing water scarcity in Jordan and works on a new film, book and sound installation.

Director, camera, edit: Pavel Borecký
Production: Institut of Social Anthropology, University of Bern
Script: Pavel Borecký, Franziska Voigt

Language of dialogues: Arabic
Language of subtitles: English, Czech

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/282462351
 

MASA

Česká republika, 2017, 32 min
M. Pavlásek, I. Bystřičan
03.03.2020 16:30

The mass is a distillation of human evolution, a parable about the treatment of substance, an image of the control over bodies that are hanged on the world’s tissue, or else disgorged from the ocean mass onto dry land, which is interwoven with bodies and the movement of hunters, gatherers, and vagabonds. Our observation of the various forms of abstracted masses, which we become part of at the same time, creates a platform of eternal presence – an active void if you will, which revolves in a closed circle, as though it had neither beginning nor end. What is left is just the stark presence of the traces of bared lives.

Michal Pavlásek  is social anthropologist, university teacher, freelance journalist and documentarist, Turkish coffee lover, researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Co-founder of Anthropictures - flexible association of social scientists providing independent field research. In his research focuses on migration and multuculturalism. He is author of movies Searching for the Exit (2016), Another Vojvodovo: thinking in pictures (2013), Time Bows Beneath the Burden of the Grapes. The Past, Czechs and Germans in the Serbian Banat (2012).

Ivo Bystřičan is documentary filmmaker, story-editor and screenwriter. He directed several feature documentary films like Copper Age (2010), My Last 150 000 Cigarettes (2013), Byeway (2014), Mr. Chytil´s Crime (2014), Middle Dusk (2015) and many others. He graduated from sociology at Masaryk University in Brno and documentary filmmaking at FAMU in Prague.

Director, Production, Script: M. Pavlásek, I. Bystřičan
Camera, Edit: I.Bystřičan

Language of Dialogues: English, Greek
Language of subtitles: Czech