Worlds apart

'Cinema Travelers’ references a bygone era of nomadic reel-to-reel movie screening outfits.

By BARRY DAVIS
The plight of migrant workers is portrayed in ‘What We Have Made.’ (photo credit: Courtesy)
The plight of migrant workers is portrayed in ‘What We Have Made.’
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Visual documents have always been an efficient means of conveying information about some far-off place, or about some topic about which we have no prior knowledge, especially of the filmic kind. That will be amply imparted at the Sixth Anthropological Film Festival, which will takes place at the Jerusalem Cinematheque November 28-30, under the auspices of the host venue and the department of sociology and anthropology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Artistic director Nurit Kedar has put together an intriguing mix of documentaries that present a diverse range of social, cultural and political issues that reflect the human condition across a swath of cultures and ethnic environments. Over the three days, we will be able to catch films from Siberia, India, Congo, China, Ghana and the Kalahari Desert, to mention but a few places most of us will probably never get to ourselves.
All told, Kedar has corralled 15 works for our entertainment and enlightenment. Some are fun, others may make for a less comfortable watch, and some are downright moving. All will probably leave us with a better idea of societies and cultures, and aspects of life in foreign climes, that don’t often make it to the headlines, and with food for thought.
Take, for example, Cairo Jazzman, by Atef Ben Bouzid.
The Berlin-based filmmaker spent long stretches in the Egyptian capital following developments leading up to the 2014 Cairo Jazz Festival.
Cairo? A jazz festival? That is not the sort of verbal bedfellow amalgam one normally associates with the Egyptian megacity. All most of us know about the country just to the southwest of us is the political upheavals of recent years, following the Arab Spring, and a long history of military clashes.
Who would have thought that, among the 20 million- plus residents of Cairo, fighting their way through the traffic jams, struggling to contend with the “joys” of urban living, there would be a character by the name of Amro Salah. What Salah really wants to do with his time is write and perform jazz, but he also has a strong urge to spread the word. That penchant led him to establish the Cairo Jazz Festival which, against all financial, bureaucratic and political odds, has been a going – possibly, slightly limping – concern since 2009.
That could open us up to the idea that there are some people over there, in Egypt, a country with which we have official peace but not too much in the way of actual normalized interchange, who just want to get on with their lives. And some of them even have offthe- wall ideas they manage to play out.
That leads to the question of whether Kedar harbors some lofty ideals, some hidden agenda, behind the Anthropological Film Festival. Is she looking to change our perception of the world around us, at least a little? And, if so, does she believe that may spur us on to taking a more proactive approach? The artistic director says she is not into seismic thought shifts.
“I want to provide information about the world around us,” she simply states, adding, however, that she would be happy for us to stretch the confines of cogitative swath. “The world around us is not just about what we might see on a four-day luxury cruise.
There are things around us we should know about.”
Kedar may devise appealing documentary lineups, but she is not one to let ambition get the better of her.
“I don’t know of any film that really changed the way of thinking, or changed policy,” she posits.
But, surely, no one expects a documentary about, say, the intrusion of a Western commercial enterprise into some previously untouched spot in the Amazon basin for crass capital gain to activate a magic wand. Even the most fired-up environmentalist would admit that it is a pebble-in-a-puddle progress continuum.
“Anthropologists do get out there and make films – not always of the highest standard – and come back with important information,” continues Kedar. So films do make a difference after all. “People come out of the cinematheque auditoriums – and they are always full at the festival – in shock at what they have just seen. So, yes, people do take things on board.”
In addition to the screenings, the festival program features a number of lectures and panel discussions with some of the directors.
“The people who come to the festival always enjoy that,” says Kedar. “They ask questions about, for example, why the director became interested in the topic, and how they went about making the film. People do leave the screenings with important information which, I believe, expands their way of thinking about the world.”
Sounds like job done or, at least, in progress.
Some of the items in the screening lineup don’t make for light entertainment. One such is Mama Colonel, by young Congolese filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi, which earlier this year won prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel documentary festival in Paris. It also screened at the HotDocs festival in Toronto and at the AFI DOCS Film Festival in Washington, DC, as well as in Poland, South Korea and South Africa.
Mama Colonel tells the daunting tale of a Congolese female senior police officer doing her damnedest to help protect women and girls from battering and sexual abuse, and to give them some hope of a better future.
You cannot help but be impressed by this feisty character who fights patriarchal thinking and a woeful lack of resources to do her bit to make the world a better place.
“Mama Colonel is a tremendous film,” says Kedar. “A woman, in the police force, goes to the most remote villages and helps women who have been raped, whose children have been murdered, and who live in poverty and the direst of circumstances. It is a truly astounding film.”
Kedar is, of course, happy with all the films on the festival agenda, but proffers Singing with the Angry Bird as one of the highlights of the three-day program.
“It opens the festival. I watched it and cried my eyes out,” she says. I also watched it and agree wholeheartedly. The film tells the story of a veteran opera singer from South Korea, called Jae-Chang Kim, sent by an NGO to Pune, India, to establish a choir for children from the downmarket side of town. Kim runs into all sorts of challenging logistics and eventually decides to recruit some of the parents to the musical venture, too. He gets his moniker from the children, as he intermittently vents his frustration with the stopstart dynamics.
As the story unravels we learn about some of the trials and tribulations faced by the children and the adults alike, and it is fair to expect a fair amount of eye-wiping during the cinematheque screening. You can also expect to catch some smile-and laughter- inducing slots, as there are plenty of heartwarming and joyful moments in there, too.
Simon Stadler’s Ghostland should certainly leave the audience with something to mull over. The documentary focuses on members of the Ju’Hoansi tribe living in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia.
The fascinating element of the movie lies in the fact that it not only portrays the way the bushmen live and how they have become dependent on tourism for a living – following a government ban on hunting – but also documents the tribesmen’s view of the Western world, as they travel to a nearby city and, later, four of them fly to Europe to see where white people – who the Africans initially thought were ghosts – come from.
Elsewhere on the festival roster, there is a delightful throwback item about a wandering reel-to-reel cinema in India; and films on how one man tries to keep the oil companies away from reindeer- mating territories in Siberia, sweatshop workers in China, and an emotive look at the lot of migrant workers in Europe.
For tickets and more information: (02) 565-4333 and www.jer-cin.org.il