MOVIES
Česká republika, 2011, 99 min
Milan Durňak, Magdalena Koháková
28.01.2012 17:10
What should antropological films be like? How to come to terms with alternating view of the world and with stereotypes in us? In a 3-year span, this issue kept busy an execution team around Milan Durňak who went back to his home-village to capture life of Roma people together with their Ruthenian neighbours. Every stay in the Roma colony brought one episode of a film which captures everyday life, tries to describe problems which trouble them and constantly strive to jump over their own shadows. The spectator has a chance to encounter a story in a social-cummunity centre with a hard-working mayor and festivals in the village and think about the worries and merriments of one Roma colony.
Milan Durňak graduated at Charles Univerity in Prague, main field ethnology. Currently he is working at the University as a Phd student. In his studies, he mainly deals with visual anthropology and creation of antropological films.
Director: Milan Durňak
Production: Milan Durňak, Magdalena Koháková
Language of dialogues: Slovakian, Czech, Rusyn language, Gypsy language
Language of subtitles: Slovakian
USA, 2008, 6 min
Jonathan Taee
27.01.2012 18:05
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who died at the young age of 57 in 1961. His work on Phenomenology opened up a new realm in continental philosophy. He managedto get philosophers to think of the body as a required and fundamental element of existence, rather than a simple vessel that carries the mind. He understood the importance of its fleshy boundaries and its ability to perceive the world through a string of immediate moments. Hisphilosophies have gone on to shape and inform many social theories used in Anthropology.
The film explores the body and the way it experiences the world. Each frame represents a moment, the moment before the body's experiences are captured by the consciousness and given cultural or emotional meanings and interpretations. The body does not sense the world through 5 set senses, feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling. The raw body senses the world as one big sensing organ. It experiences the world in one immediate relationship of body to world. The body has a synaesthetic sense that operates below the consciousness, as one flesh. This sense speaks through the entire body, using every contour and curve to feel the world it moves through. The raw body is immediate in its experiencing of the world, it is fluid and conversational, ever reading, learning and changing to the world around it.
This film honours the work of Merleau-Ponty, and through the mediums of 16mm, high speed digital film and SLR still imaging, it pays homage our most sensuous and intimate relations to the world around us.
Jonathan is a currently conducting field work in Bhutan for his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His current research explores the integration of healthcare in Bhutan and its affects on patients’ healing experiences.Concepts of body, experience and phenomenology have been a constant companion to his work, including the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty. This film was made at the University of Virginia while exploring the philosopher’s ideas of flesh and experience as socially contingent phenomena.
Director and production: Jonathan Taee
Language of dialogues: none
Language of subtitles: none
Launching of movie:
Salmagundi Film Festival, University of Virginia, USA
Ivy Film Festival, USA
Estonia, 2010, 68 min
Liivo Niglas
28.01.2012 13:15
The action in the film revolves around an ancestrally used practice of hunting sable by net. Set in rural Kamchatka in the Russian Far East, where fewer than 20 speakers of Itelmen remain, the film goes beyond its original aim to recapture a language and a hunting practice that are remembered but no longer in use. Two hunters encounter the wild environs and villages of Kamchatka as a history laden homeland and memories, nostalgia, resignation and hope echo throughout the film.
Liivo Niglas, born in Estonia in 1970 is currently a lecture of ethnology at University of Tartu, Estonia. He also 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 work are “The Brigade” (2000), “Yuri Vellas´s World” (2003), “Adventure High” (2004), “Making Rain” (2007).
Director and production: Liivo Niglas
Language of dialogues: Russian, Itelmen
Language of subtitles: English
Lauching of film and award (selection):
International Festival of Ethnological Film, Belgrade, Serbia, 2011. Grand Prix.
Sardinia International Ethnographic Film Festival, Nuoro, Italy, 2010
Festival of Visual Anthropology ASPEKTY, Torun, Poland, 2010
Parnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival, Parnu, Estonia, 2011
