Delhi International Ethnographic Film Festival : Schedule for 30 November

[Rahul Roy]

Delhi International Ethnographic Film Festival
  26 -30 November 2008

DIEFF screening on 29 and 30 November will take place only at Alliance
Francaise, Lodi Estate, New Delhi. The screenings at Delhi University and
Jamia Millia Islamia end on 28 Nov.


DIEFF Schedule for Sunday, 30 November 2008

Venue:  Alliance Francaise, Lodi Estate, Sunday, 30 Nov

Time: 11:00 AM to 8:15 PM

For More information: http://sociology.du.ac.in/dieff/
                                    or search the web for -- DIEFF

 

Photowallahs at 11:00 am / Alliance Francaise / Lodi Estate

 

Dir: David and Judith MacDougall / 60 min / dirs. present

 

Photo Wallahs is a film about the varied meanings of photography.  It is set in Mussoorie, a famous hill station in northern India, that has attracted tourists since the 19th century.  In this setting photography has thrived.  Without spoken commentary, the film discovers its subject in the streets, bazaars, shops, photographic studios and private homes of Mussoorie.  In the process it compares the diverse work and attitudes of the local photographers-Mussoorie's "photo wallahs."  Although photography has developed certain culturally distinctive features in India, its many forms and uses there tell us much about the nature and significance of photography throughout the world.

 

The Lunch Box at 12:15 /Alliance Francaise / Lodi Estate

 

Dir: Floriane Devigne / 52 min / Belgium

 

Show me your lunch box and I shall tell you where you come from! It is this ordinary, functional object that is at the core of a surprising and entertaining investigation of Belgium and its people. With humour and naive amazement, serious research and intuition, Floriane Devigne, in her first film, embarks on a journey to try and understand her country, brandishing the lunch box as a link to hold together this diverse community. With a light touch she reveals a plethora of insights in the humble receptacle: Marxist theories, Joris Iven's Borinage film on Belgian miners, French-Wallonese-Flemish differences, slag heaps and parks, malnutrition and child poverty, immigration, linguistic and cultural boundaries. She cuddles and destroys the box, builds statistic towers with it, drives it around and looks deep into its etymology. And casually she also pokes fun at her own obsession with the object. A film inside a lunch box.

 

 

Conversations with Jean Rouch at 2:00 pm /  Alliance Francaise / Lodi Estate

 

Dir: Ann McIntosh / 40 min / France, Italy, USA

 

This intimate, revealing video of conversations between Jean Rouch and a number of filmmakers and friends, including John Marshall and Colin Young, was shot between 1978 and 1980 by Ann McIntosh, who taught video under Ricky Leacock at MIT. McIntosh gained Rouch's trust while shooting informal cinéma vérité scenes of him at various locations: film seminars in New England (USA), Chateau Thierry  in France (the WWII period for Jean), Monaco (where his father worked and  died), Marcilly (the family homestead), Italy (at his vacation house with  his first wife Jane), as well as to graduate seminars at the Sorbonne and  the Cinémathèque Française. The video provides fascinating  insights about Rouch as he discusses his methodology with students and colleagues,  revealing the man at his most tender and most serious. Jean 's extraordinary wisdom and sense of humor permeates McIntosh's work.

 

 

L.A.P.A. at 3:00 pm / Alliance Francaise / Lodi Estate

 

Dir: Emílio Domingos e Cavi Borges / 75 min / Brazil

 

The traditionally bohemian Lapa neighborhood (Rio de Janeiro), a place formerly frequented by samba players, has also been a meeting point for rappers during the 1990s.

 

 

Strange Homeland at 4:30 pm / Alliance Francaise / Lodi Estate

 

Dir: Jens Schanze / 81 min / Germany

 

Otzenrath, a little 700 year old village near Cologne, is the first among 13 other villages that have been resettled due to "Garzweiler II", Europe's largest open-cast lignite pit.
Despite the harmful effects of carbon dioxide, the exploitation of lignite for the production of electric power will continue at least until the middle of the 21st century. In Germany alone 25 plants to electrify coal are planned or currently under construction. Worldwide, more than 1000 coal plants will go into service by 2012. The 2600 inhabitants of Otzenrath started their collective resettlement in 2000. The film documents the impact of the gigantic industrial lignite project on the lives of people in a country that – like any other industrialized nation – is addicted to electric power in order to maintain the living standard of its people.

 

 

Confluence - Emerillon of French Guiana at 6:15 pm / Alliance Francaise / Lodi Estate

 

Dir: Perle Mohl / 78 min / Denmark, France

 

 

Like self-fulfilling omens, scientific reports have hitherto depicted the Emerillon of French Guiana as cultureless and doomed to disappear.

With this film, a Danish anthropologist proposes to defy the negative images, simultaneously delving into their world and giving a vivid description of the down-to-earth, capricious and inter-subjective conditions of anthropological fieldwork and knowledge-creation. Several Emerillon take up the proposition, and through their resourceful and often stumbling efforts to maintain a life in the forest while profiting from their French citizenship, they present another version of what being Emerillon is all about.

We follow them through communal fishing trips, forest foraging, artistic creativity, French schooling and municipal elections, discovering how they face the day with humour, manage to bridge the gaps and make their lives whole.

Thus emerges a rare, profoundly generous and non-ethnocentric discourse, one that asserts that to feel Emerillon does not necessarily imply feeling fundamentally different from others.