Taking a good look at ourselves

The global village, with its ostensibly infinite virtual lines of communication, they say, has made the world shrink. There is practically nowhere on Earth today that is inaccessible, or that we do not know about. That may or may not be the case, but as Prof. Tamar El Or points out, accruing masses of information does not necessarily mean we have a good handle on the ground-level facts and human sensibilities. El Or is a member of the artistic committee that selected the lineup for this year's Anthropological Film Festival, which will take place at the Jerusalem Cinematheque November 28 to 30. The fifth edition of the event takes in 14 documentaries from vastly differing cultures, mind-sets and geographical locations around the world. When she's not helping to put together an intriguing film festival, El Or is gainfully employed as a professor of anthropology at the Hebrew University. Her principal areas of academic interest lie at the intersection between gender, culture and knowledge. Her PhD dissertation was a pioneering study of ultra-Orthodox women in Israel, and her research findings were published, as Educated and Ignorant, in both Hebrew and English. El Or and her fellow committee members certainly had their work cut out for them, sifting through over 100 films submitted to the festival for consideration. “We sent out a call for proposals to all sorts of networks of ethnographic cinema, and they sent in films. Then we members of the committee sat down and divided them up between us and watched them,” explains El Or. This year's jury also included documentarian Nurit Kedar and theater lecturer and dramaturge Prof. Annabelle Winograd. The committee lineup was completed by two staff members from the cinematheque, indicating that the festival is not only proffered as a grand time for people with a keen interest in anthropology, and that there is some genuine entertainment value in there too. “We definitely want to make sure that we have really good films to show the audiences,” El Or states, although adding that the members of the public don't get to see all the gems that pass through the committee members' hands. “Sometimes we have great films and wonderful photography and artistic cinema, but there is always a delicate debate going on as to whether certain films can be defined as anthropological.” Geography also comes into the reckoning. “This year, for example, we had a beautiful film about textiles and about threads,” says El Or, “but it was very vague and it was shot at many places around the world, with lots of characters. It was as if there was a theme that connected everything in the film, but we always prefer a film to be culturally situated, and located in a place where you can see social circles in that region. It should not touch on a theme; rather, it should be about a human group, a family or something similar. It is a slightly loose definition, but the anthropological tradition is very situated. It is strongly connected to a geographical location.” That is certainly the case in the films that were approved by the committee members, although many of the movies include jaunts away from the base location. The films I managed to see ahead of time were all compelling in terms of subject matter, dynamics and aesthetics. Where To Miss? is a fascinating German-Indian co-production about a young woman who struggles to defy the dictates of a patriarchal society. It is an emotive work that appears to paint a nakedly honest picture of cross-generational friction and the seemingly intractable barriers that a male-dominated society places before women. One of the most charming properties of the films I viewed was the candid portrayal of street-level life. Harking back to the opening premise that today's Internet-facilitated world lays everything on the line but also tends to gloss over individual subtleties and cultural nuances, films such as the Australian-Egyptian joint venture The Tentmakers of Cairo make for compelling and convincing viewing. 'Tentmakers of Cairo' (photo credit: Courtesy) Over here one tends to think of our southern neighbors as a country in disarray populated by mostly political hard-liners with trenchant views on their homeland and the world around them. This documentary is spiced with numerous entertaining vignettes that reveal there is much more to Egyptian society than comes across in breaking- news items and other such pigeonholing media offerings. The principal characters in The Tentmakers of Cairo are a bunch of around 10 men who struggle to make ends meet, and feed their families, as carpet embroiderers. The documentary portrays a market area of Cairo in delicate, definitively human hues as we learn how they go about their business, and we are privy to some intriguing tête-à-têtes about this and that, including their honest views about the impending presidential elections. There is also plenty of self-deprecation and dark humor, which adds to the film's endearing qualities. “You get a mix of the outside world together with a picture of Egypt in the film,” El Or notes. “And the political developments in Egypt provide a backdrop to the market, and you get a sort of historical perspective from an unpredictable angle.” The freedom with which the carpet embroiderers discuss their views on the country's leaders, and on the situation as a whole, comes as a surprise. “There is a degree of desperation there, because it's [president Mohamed] Morsi, the fundamentalist,” says El Or. “They see what is going on in the Western world, and they are despondent. El Or believes there is much to be learned from gaining a glimpse of the mundane lives of people who would normally not even be a footnote in our own everyday existence. “You often see, through people who are very different to us, the great similarity between us. We take the differences for granted, but then, suddenly, we look at things like these [in the films] and we see there are a lot of things elsewhere that are very familiar to us.” El Or notes that some are not too positive either, in particular referencing the Indian film. “OK, so my husband's father cannot tell me not to be a taxi driver, but I also live with patriarchal expectations in my own society. Observation of the something, or someone, that is diametrically different to you can also reflect back on you, and you think, OK, so it's different, but it is also very like what I know. That is a sort of thought flexibility that is always afforded by art in general, and certainly by art which has a strong social orientation.” It is a seminal theme in El Or's line of work. “Looking at the other in order to understand yourself lies at the root of anthropology.” Not all the items in the festival lineup roam to culturally distant places. All This Panic, for example, portrays the trials, tribulations and joys of seven adolescent girls from New York and how they deal with peer pressure, domestic problems and the full range of issues faced by many contemporary Western youngsters. 'All This Panic' (photo credit: Courtesy) “The film documents the lives of seven girls over a period of three years,” El Or explains. “They are middle-class families from Brooklyn; they aren't working-class. But all the families are fragile and have to contend with being evicted here and there, there are fears, the girls go to high school and they are apprehensive about attending college studies.” It is something with which many of us can readily identify. “The film shows that not everything is rosy in the Big Apple, which is not without its problems. These are mostly white families, and they have their challenges, too. We see the fragility in this world.” The festival also features a tribute to one of the pioneering works in the field, Robert Flaherty's trailblazing portrayal of the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region, Nanook of the North, made in 1922. It was a significant eye-opener for anyone who saw the documentary back then and, like all the works in this year's Anthropological Film Festival, helps to introduce us to ourselves. For tickets and more information: (02) 565-4333, *9377 and http://jer-cin.org.il/website/modules/ films/Program.aspx?id=755

Taking a good look at ourselves

At next week’s Anthropological Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, get a glimpse of the other and understand yourself.

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Taking a good look at ourselves

At next week’s Anthropological Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, get a glimpse of the other and understand yourself.

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