24.-25.1.2014
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF MOVIES
WITH ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEMES

BEHIND THE WHEEL

Velká Británie, 2013, 20 min
Elise Laker
25.01.2014 17:45

Every year, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers leave Tajikistan in search of employment. The money sent back provides a huge boost to the economy; in fact, Tajikistan is the most remittance-dependent country in the world. The vast majority of these migrants are male, which means the Tajik population is becoming ever-more female. So what happens to the women who are left behind?
Behind the Wheel serves as an inquiry into the moral and emotional turmoil of Nigora, an Uzbek woman whose traditional life of being a housewife is interrupted after her migrant husband fails to send back enough money and she finds out he has been having an affair. No longer able to rely on her husband, Nigora defies prevailing gender norms and sets to work fixing car tyres.

Elise is a recent graduate of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, where she received training in observational filmmaking. Alongside her MA, she hold a BA in French and Russian from University of Nottingham. Elise has travelled extensively throughout Central Asia and has a fascination with post-Soviet countries.

Production: The Granada Center for Visual Anthropology, University of Mancherster, UK
Director, camera: Elise Laker
Dialogues: Uzbeck, subtitles: English, Czech
 

MAN DOVE

Indonésie, 2012, 65 min
J.de Séve, K.Tjong
25.01.2014 14:00

Two filmmakers dive into an ancient rite of manhood in Islamic Java – the tender and raucous sport of the singing doves, the Indonesian Nascar. When General Zainuri announces The National Perkutut Championship, thousands of Muslim men arrive at the grounds. Seven hundred poles stand in the center. Men hoist their doves – perkutut – seven meters up and dangle them ina sea of colorful cages.
A team of judges passes trought the forest of tall posts straining to discern the birds magical coos. If the judges are impressed they score a bird´s dong by tacking a small flag to the pole. After three hours a winner is declared. Winning perkutut sell for tens of milion rupiahs – tens of thousands of dollars.

Jim de Séve teches film production at Union College in Schenectady. Prior to that, he was an instructor at Film Video Arts in NYC for ten year. He sists at the board of Media Alliance, a non-for-profit who operates a sanctuary for independent media.
Kian Tjong was born and raised in Indonesia and he has lived in the US since 1997 when he came as a Fujitsu MBA scholar at the University of Hawaii and Japan-America Institute of Management Science.

Dialogues: Indonesian, subtitles: English, Czech 
production, directors, camera: Jim de Séve a Kian Tjong

Launching (selection):
Taiwan Intenational Ethnographic Film Festival, 2013
Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, Edinburg, 2013
Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Québec, 2013
Moscow International Festival of Visual Anthropology, 2012
Kazan Festival of Muslim Cinema, 2012
 

ON THE COMMON GROUND

Velká Británie, 2013, 25 min
Sophie Wagner
25.01.2014 20:10

On a small hill in the north of Israel the members of a religious kibbutz, a community of artists and an Arab village – who share a politically fraught history including losing homes and reclaming identity – live as neighbours in a hillside. Although villagers of the three communities do not hold many narratives in common, they do share an understanding of the power od mastering them. The way in which each story, and they are often conflicting ones of victim-hood and guilt, pride and wrongdoings, contains the other without neccessarily relating to it, laid bare a sense of unavoidable inter-subjectivity- This film is an attempt to communicate alternative points of views to the often quite stereotypical imagery we, in central Europe, are bound to perceive via dramatic media reports on the situation in Israel. We follow people´s lives in a shared enviroment and begin to understand, that individual identifications to rarely match up with official categories, which are deployed by state sponsored narratives. The governing of those is a powerful tool – therefore the creation of contemporary, shared, narratives of land and people is a politically meaningful act. On Common Ground points to the question if, and how, this can have an effect in a country that is divided within and under constant pressure from the outside.

Sophie Wagner graduated from cultural and social anthropology at the University od Vienna. Now, she is currently finishing her second MA in the Centre of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is also working for the Ethnocineca – Vienna´s documentary and ethnographic film fest.

Dialogues: English, Hebrew, Subtitles: English, Czech
Production, director, camera: Sophie Wagner

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