TUMENGE
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
This film narrates the meeting with Sara Marielle Gaup and Lawra Somby, two young performers of joik (Sami chanting technique), born in the north and the south of Sápmi (the cultural nationhood of Sami people in North Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). They have come together through a creative musical project called “Adjágas” which in Sami means “the state between sleep and awakening”. In this peculiar state one can unveil reality and tune into the most profound and original joiks. Adjágas, in this way bring the musical-lyrical practice of joik toward the international musical scene by performing with musicians of different horizons, and adapting its performances to the context of reception. The protagonists express different ways of life and concerns, relating also to what it means to be young artists with an indigenous background, having to work a way into the musical industry. It is also a film about what in the waves of the past is worth struggling for understanding, and how joik brings together everyday life, politics and spirituality and becomes a language healing the pain from the colonial history of the past.
Consuming images is a daily experience. Before learning how to read words, we learn to read pictures. Details are the keys that help us to contextualize, to compose countless notions of the whole from which we now see just the extract contained in a once chosen framing. But are we ever really able to reconstruct past moments depicted in foreign photograph that are someone´s materialized memories? Can we reach a clear undestanding of what should be remembered when already two people looking at a picture see two different picture just as two people with open eyes see two different worlds? Watching a photograph together means to journey on different paths into the past..Still the viewers eyes can meet – in a wine glass on the left bottom corner.
