It is only the second time that Indonesians can vote for their own president. Two charismatic women, however, are not satisfied with mere elections. Grandma Dela, who lives in a slum of the tropical megacity, and the intellectual Wardah Hafidz are setting out to collect 1.5 million signatures of the poorest, who are constantly threatened by the local arbitrary justice…
JAKUB, by the Czech filmmaker Jana Sevikova, presents an extensive ethnographical-sociological study of the life of the Ruthenians, filmed in the Maramuresh mountains in the north of Romania and in the former Sudetenland in Western Bohemia. The film was made over a period of five years during the time of both totalitarian regimes and was completed in 1992 after the…
In Japigia, a neighborhood in the periphery of Bari, Italy, a small community of Roma (Gypsies) carve out an existence in an illegal, ramshackle encampment. The local church has offered them a piece of land with prefabricated houses, but the town hall is preventing this offer due to their own plans for a future a railway station. Continually in danger…
In Jerusalem, three religions meet. They harmoniously coexist. While the guides lead us through the streets of Jerusalem, we can see people from different backgrounds and culture live in the same neighbourhood. The guides are the meessagers of time. They deliver the message that only time can solve all the disputes and trouble.
The guides even tell us three stories,…
A series of scenes in the life of a Balinese child, It begins with a seventh-month birthday ceremonial, showing Kaba’s relationships to his parents, aunts, and uncles, including the child’s nurse, and other children, as he is suckled, taught to walk and dance, and teased and titillated. The film illustrates that a Balinese child’s responsiveness is muted if the parents…
Flowing out from the spinning cassette tape, one after one, the melody of top tribal classics sway on the stage witnessing the golden days of Kaleskes Labaceken and Biung Isdanda as time goes by. In the whispering words of tribes, emotions are moved by the persistence of Cule.e Gaku to the old folk music. The forever-young music band of producer…
Born in 1981, a Nanao Atayal from Yilan, Wu Ta Elementary School teacher Wilang hunted with elders in the mountains and learned rattan weaving techniques since he was a boy. He has an old soul that is passionate about Atayal culture. In 2014, Wilang embarked on the “Finding our Roots Project” at Wu Ta Elementary School. He took school children…
Kasheer is an ethnographic film examining artistic production in the disputed territory of India-controlled Kashmir. The legacies of a catastrophic insurgency and indefinite militarization by Indian security forces produces stark social and political complexities embedded in daily life. Kasheer portrays three local visual artists who work to make sense of tragedy and to reformulate a cultural identity inextricably linked to…
This film documents the boat-building and rowing process from Tao Island to Taiwan, sponsored by the “2007 Dream Project: Rowing 2007 Ocean Etude.” It shows the essence of Tao oceanic culture. The director worked with his good Tao friend, Shyaman Vengaayen, as the curators of an exhibition project about the traditional Tao boat-building culture at the National Museum of Natural…
A documentary recording the lives of Khon students in their last years of study. They spent six years under the rules of the military regime after the 2014 coup d’etat. The coup granted the regime power to change many things, especially education which became more focused on the monarchy and royal glorification instead of basic human values. While the world…
Kimbo Hu, called “the godfather of aboriginal folk songs,” is a pioneer of the folk music movement. When Taiwan’s democratization movement was at its height, he sang about the unfair treatment which the aboriginal peoples have suffered. Today, as the aboriginal movement seems to be at an end , Kimbo Hu has returned to his life as a singer, releasing…
Dahna Abourahme is a Palestinian filmmaker who grew up in Abu Dhabi and Amman. She received her MA in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York where she worked as a filmmaker and youth media educator. She is currently living in Beirut teaching at the Lebanese American University and involved in community media. In 2004,…
Kusum is an ordinary, 14-year-old Indian girl. She lives in Delhi, India, where she goes to school and wonders about her future—until she falls ill. She stops eating, isolates herself and suffers raving fits. ”Evil spirits have attacked the family,” says Bhagat, an old healer. Kusum’s family initially tries Western medicine, but then opts for traditional Indian spiritual healing. It…
In Sorok-do where traveled by chance, we encountered an old woman, Lee Hang Sim, 78-years old, who was dragged into Sorok-do at the age of 4 by her parents because of Hanses’s disease. Pregnant after emancipation, she hid her pregnancy for 10 months for she was forbidden to give a birth. She couldn’t even scream in travail until cock crow…
Buraunse is a remote Himalayan village in Humla Districts of Nepal. As in some the himayan districts that share border with tibet, the institution of polyandary is still practiced by trh Lama community there. Adhering to the age-old Tibetan Buddhist tradition, brothers marry a common wife. Over the recent years, however younger generation exposed to modern reluctant to follow the…
Israel says that it is planning to remove and relocate 2,300 Bedouins from the Judean desert, east of Jerusalem. Over the past four decades they were pushed down the valley close to a hazardous highway while Jewish settlements and outposts dotted the Judean hilltops. The Bedouin shacks are routinely demolished by the Israeli Civil Administration on the grounds that they…
Weaving together the stories and interactions of five activists (Joshua Wong, Denise Ho, Wong Yeung Tat, Ed Lau and Derek Lam) and their friends with astonishing fluidity as they come to terms with life in a post-Umbrella Movement Hong Kong and the realisation that life is the sum of all their choices. Director Matthew Torne (Lessons in Dissent [2014], Joshua:…
Laundry Lives takes us into the usually invisible everyday worlds of five middle class Indonesians: Lia, Dyna, Ning, Adi and Nur. As Indonesia’s economy and market grow, there are hidden implications for the domestic lives of the country’s rapidly expanding professional middle classes and for environmental sustainability. Laundry Lives captures this moment of change, showing the shifting gender relations, new…
“le ciel, la terre et l’homme” tries to get hold of the impressions of the Moroccan desert landscape, through which perpetually blows the wind, as well as of the people living there and to tell their stories. In the reality of the film a space of encounters with Ahmed, Yussef, Lahcen, and Idir is being developed and their stories enable…
Leprous Life records the life stories of leprous patients at Lo-sheng Hospital in Hsin-chuang, Taiwan. The shooting took eight years. Many patients came to Lo-Sheng when they were children, and they have been convicted of life imprisonment by the society. They left home and were jailed in Lo-Sheng for almost fifty years. When the Taipei Metro Rapid Transit Company started…