2003 Film and Video Festival Commendations

Award of Lifetime Achievement

John Marshall A KALAHARI FAMILY
Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources

From his epic film, The Hunters, shot in the early 1950s, to the present, incomparable series, A Kalahari Family, John Marshall has struggled to know and allow Westerners to know the Ju/’huansi of the Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa. Marshall’s vision of gathering and hunting taught generations of American students of anthropology. His documentary vision of this family offers a record of world historical importance. More thoroughly and more deeply than any other filmmaker, Marshall has brought a sense of immediacy and comprehension to the subsistence patterns which resembles those of all human existence save for the last 10,000 years. As the South African state increasingly marginalized the !Kung and permitted their virtual enslavement, Marshall continued to expose the story, until eventually he was ejected from the country for his critical, and widely disseminated, views. When he was finally permitted back in the country, Marshall produced N!ai: Story of a !Kung Woman, released in 1979. A deeply disturbing film, N!ai shows how South Africa’s forced sedentarization of the !Kung caused them hunger, illness, appalling commodifications of culture and religion, and led to crippling internal dissent. Again, Marshall’s film transformed the understanding of a generation, bringing one facet of the crimes of Apartheid to immediate awareness. Now, Marshall has given another opus, made from hundreds of hours of his original footage. This five part, six hour series documents the journey of Marshall and his family, their first encounters, and the slow development of his relationships with his Kalahari families. These stories weave a hunting and gathering past with the movement toward a farming present, through struggles and courage. A Kalahari Family transcends the biographical to include the horrific history and aftermath of South Africa’s Apartheid and the failure of tourist enterprises. It is somber metaphor of genocidal practices and cultural destruction conducted by many other countries, including our own.

Awards of Excellence

Marije Meerman CHAIN OF LOVE
Distributed by First Run Icarus

This is a documentary about emotional labor, the international phenomenon of nannies for hire from the Philippines who serve babies across the first world. The nannies’ babies are themselves cared for in the Philippines by other nannies, lower on the international food chain. Chain of Love offers deep insights into the new globalized labor process, and confidently explores international relations of exploitation. Stylistically unique, beautifully crafted, it makes subtle theoretical arguments extremely comprehensible. It presents one of the most affective integrations of the ethnographic commitment to the insiders’ point of view and the abstract arguments that social scientists make to explain.

Dumisani Phakathi WA’N WINA (a film from Steps for the Future Project)
Distributed by California Newsreel

A startling, intimate, indigenous ethnography of sexuality in South Africa’s crisis of AIDS. Perhaps the most striking of the Steps for the Future series, this film opens up the pain and violence that accompany struggles of gender inequalities, ostracism and death. The filmmaker returns to his childhood neighborhood, finding boys moving into manhood and young women struggling with maturity. Many are in trouble; most are very poor. With masterful camerawork and editing that make this complex film seem simple, the insider processes of filmmaking helps its subjects manifest their courage and inspires courage in those who see them.

Alex Gabbay, Ruchir Joshi KING FOR A DAY
Distributed by Bullfrog Films

In a tour de force of Swiftian irony, King for a Day documents the visit of President Bill Clinton to Bangladesh in the year 2000. The film adopts the perspective of a world-weary journalist who is forced to cover the arrival of a man whose quest he understands ultimately to be the theft of national oil. The journalist never sees Clinton: police won’t let him get within blocks, so instead covers local preparations for the great visit, including protests and the bull dozing of unsightly, if densely populated, shacks along the motorcade’s route from the airport. Despite the outrageousness of the preparations, the film never loses its serious purpose, the story of a third world country’s forced obsequiousness to the global power. Through humor and incisive observational filmmaking, King for a Day makes the viewpoint of a U.S.-doubting Bangladeshi citizen utterly accessible to a U.S. audience.

Awards of Commendation

Patricia Flynn DISCOVERING DOMINGA
Distributed by UCEMIL

A Mayan girl, orphaned by the massacre of her parents in Guatemala, was adopted and raised by an American couple in Iowa. Eighteen years later, she and her husband return to meet her extended family and discover, along with the film’s audience, facts about the massacre. Discovering Dominga is an accessible and moving introduction to the geo-politics of Central America, the role of the CIA in them, and the fact that some 400 similar genocidal raids took place in the same region at the same time. The film raises issues of identity by exploring the denial and amnesia Dominga experienced in regard to her horrific childhood events. It chronicles her psychological mastery of her experience while, in a parallel movement, it forces her to recognize how the culpability of the United States has also been erased from social memory.

Portia Rankoane A RED RIBBON AROUND MY HOUSE (a film fromSteps For the Future Project)
Distributed by California Newsreel

Shot in Soweto, this elegant documentary from the Steps for the Future collection offers an intimate portrait of an HIV-positive mother, Pinki, who has made AIDS education the guiding activity of her life. Edited into many informative education sessions are interviews with Pinki’s daughter, almost too young to feel anything about her mother’s disclosures except shame. The film brings to sharp awareness neglected facets of family life and the burden that family and friends carry when a loved one is ill with a disease that some think should not be named. Pinki is shown at moments of great strength and weakness. Unable to cease drinking despite the fact that she is taking AIDS medications, Pinki, like the film, is unforgettable, inspiring because of her frankness, courage and humor.

Katerina Cizek, Peter Wintonick SEEING IS BELIEVING
Distributed by First Run Icarus

Fired by the development of high-quality, inexpensive digital video, indigenous media has become a weapon of political activism. Consumer products are used in life-and-death contexts, providing news that doesn’t come from the news. Seeing is Believing highlights activism of an individual Philippi no media maker, a man who risks his life by making movies of a violent struggle for land and water rights. In complement to this close-up perspective, the film also includes media shot from every other point on the political spectrum, including the extreme right wing. The focus widens even more by arguing how newly emerging media has often been used to further political causes. Xerox, fax, internet and cell phones have all played roles as consumer grade revolutionary weapons.

Masoud Raouf THE TREE THAT REMEMBERS
Distributed by Bullfrog Films

A moving biographical and historical account of Iranian torture victims whose courage was expressed first to protect the regimes of Khomeini and the US-sponsored Shah that later imprisoned them and second to discuss their torture. The strength of the survivors is inspiring. The historical analysis of the prisons and their cultural contexts provide the opportunity for somber reflection on the expeditious human rights excesses perpetrated by the US military Guantanamo The Tree that Remembers is especially compelling because of it remarkable cinematography and the disturbing theatrical performances given by torture survivors.

Student Award

Nina Siule (NYU) DEPORTADO
Distributed by the filmmaker: 515 Clinton Avenue, #10, Brooklyn, NY 11236

This collaborative ethnography, co-produced from a jail cell, investigates the crumbling Bill of Rights in post 9-11 New York. The film’s subject is represented only by his articulate voice on an answering machine, since he is a prisoner, incarcerated throughout the filmmaking period for a drug-related crime. Although release from prison is impending, it is undone by a loophole in US immigration law, revitalized in the new anti-immigrant climate of the Patriotic Act. Instead of being freed after serving time, the deportado is spirited away to the Dominican Republic, Now a legally undesirable alien, he must “return” to the country from which he was taken the age of three. Despite the fact that this film has, in a sense, only a voice for its subject, it is visually fascinating throughout, and throughout it challenges the viewer with critiques of American justice and the nature of absentee participatory cinema.

Series Award

Steps for the Future
Distributed by California Newsreel, San Francisco, CA

In a series of thirty-four films, translated into many languages, the Steps for the Future project offers a profound example of the steps which a future applied visual anthropology should follow. These films all serve the broad goal of advancing HIV/AIDS awareness in Southern Africa. All are made by indigenous filmmakers with deep sensitivity to the cultural barriers that inhibit HIV risk-reduction in the region. Sensitivities and taboos differ from culture to culture, but each film finds unique and often brilliant means to open the essential questions through film. Each offers catalytic experiences which allow people to recognize, discuss and begin to conquer their barriers and silence. The indigenous filmmakers knew well how close they could step to the dangerous goal of saying out loud what was often unsaid, but they also pushed their audiences beyond the limits of silence into expression. The jury greatly admires the courage and ingenuity of these makers. The jury also wishes to praise the organizations which funded this series, particularly the SARS Foundation, for having the courage to invest resources in a topic that is dangerous in many ways. We congratulate them for trusting that these often youthful filmmakers could wend their messages through the barriers of fear.

Finally, the jury feels admiration for the wisdom of filmmaking process through which these films were produced and used. The evaluative feedback of local focus groups was used to guides to the scripting and editing stages. When the films were complete, their remarkable effectiveness was evaluated and documented in educational sessions and follow up research months later. The thoughtfulness and care with which these crucial interventions were made and then evaluated was essential for their success and an inspiring model for those in anthropology who will follow.

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