works 2009 |
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Fooling Words | Esra Gökçe Sahin Running time: 18 mins., 26 sec. Learning through pain. |
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Guardhouse |
Anand Vaidya Guardhouse asks viewers to consider the space and pace of a house that looks out onto the boundary of Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park. The stark separation between city and forest appears stranger over time as we look at the minimal guard presence and the minimal efforts expended by guards. Contact: avaidya [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Mud Missive | Fatin Abbas Running time: 20 mins. An essayistic video focusing on the work of a group of potters in Khartoum, Sudan, Mud Missive weaves reflections of clay with personal reflections on self and nation. |
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On Broadway (work-in-progress) |
Aryo Danusiri A structural account of the cultural transformation of a mosque in a basement space in Manhattan, New York City. As suggested by the title, this film is "a song" of transformational moments of space, identities and belief. Consisting of six long take shots, it starts with a relaxed conversation in the everyday life of an emptiness of a basement. Then it gradually becomes an event - an event of struggle. At the end, with a twist, it raises questions about the boundaries between the mundane and the spiritual, the politics and the everyday. Contact: danusiri [at] fas.harvard.edu / www.ragam.org |
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Quiet Revolution / Révolution Tranquille |
Lizzie Rose Running time: 12 mins. A portrait in the rural township of Austin, Quebec. |
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7 Queens |
Véréna Paravel Running time: 22 mins. Recorded during an aimless extended (anti)-ethnographic walk beneath the elevated tracks of the #7 subway line in NYC, 7 Queens wanders in the fragile zone of fleeting relations. Through a series of spontaneous interactions, this piece experiment with boundaries and physical thresholds, and captures evanescent forms of intimacy through random, and sometimes aborted encounters. Screened at the The Amie and Tony James Gallery in NYC |
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Songs from the Tundra | Alexander Berman Running time: 24 mins. A lyric journey through the awkward modernity of the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia’s most remote frontier. The film unfolds in a series of native Even songs belonging to a forgotten generation. As they sing of hunters and herders, the Evens attempt to recreate their mythic past in a reindeer camp at the foot of the Alney volcano. But hearth alone cannot be home. The Evens must leave their reindeer on a truly fearsome beast. Contact: berman [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Songs of an Unknown Island |
John Hulsey Running time: 28 mins. 50 sec. Two immigrands from Sierra Leone meet on the docklands: Alhassan in a day laborer and Willie lives on a fishing boat. Set in the Spanish Canary Islands, this video follows their day-to-day experiences in the liminal, mediated spaces between two continents. Contact: john.hulsey [at] gmail.com |
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Trees Tropiques |
Alex Fattal Running time: 30 mins. Set in the mouth of the Amazon basin, this family portrait gets tricky when the ethics of deforestation and the documentary encounter intersect. This creative documentary subtly and provocatively asks, ‘Who has the right to cut?’ — trees and footage. Screenings: Distribution: Berkeley Media LLC Contact: alfattal [at] gmail.com |
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The Truth about Cuba |
Bridget Hanna Running time: 8 mins. 30 sec. |
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works 2008 |
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Assyriska until we die... | Jennifer Mack Running time: 24 mins. 3 sec. A portrait of the fan club for the Assyrian national football team, Assyriska until we die... travels with these supporters between their hometown in the Swedish suburbs and the virtual spaces that connect them to the diaspora. Punctuated by episodes of the club's web TV show, the video follows the everyday activities of these fans during the weeks leading up to the Derby–the most important match of the season–and explores the complex relationships between membership and sport away from the game itself. Contact: jmack [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Chaiqian (Demolition) | JP Sniadecki Running Time: 66 mins. A portrait of migrant labor, urban space, and ephemeral relationships in the center of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. Contact: jpsniad [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Itna Mujhe Pata Hai (This Much I Know) | Bridget Hanna Running Time: 24 mins. 25 sec. This is the story of a teenage girl, struggling to define her life and her illness in a marginal, environmentally devastated neighborhood in Northern India. Inflected by her love of Bollywood music, and driven by frustration over the quality of health care available to her, this project investigates the relationships between environment and medicine, and between the subject and the filmmaker, as it attempts to understand one young woman's experience. Contact: bhanna [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Monsoon-Reflections | Stephanie Spray Running Time: 22 mins. 44 sec. Drawing its title from a poem by Lekhnath Paudyal, who depicts the monsoon season as sublime and blissful, this video focuses instead on the melancholy and grit of two female Nepali field hands as they carry out their monsoon routines in Lekhnath, Nepal. The video is a sensorial riposte to Paudyal's idealistic depiction of the monsoon as "joyous from start to finish," by means of reflection on labor, gender, and fleeting pleasures in rural Nepal. Contact: sspray [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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no You nor I | Felicity Aulino Running Time: 23 mins. Set in a Buddhist temple AIDS hospice in Lopburi, Thailand, this piece provides a glimpse of how people approach death, and a touch of what vocational caregivers can reveal about human communication and connection. |
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Ori Mi Pe (My Head is Correct) | Cristiana Strava Running Time: 13 mins. A reassemblage of performed cultural encounters with a group of Yoruba textile makers in the village of Ogidi, Nigeria, this work attempts to question ideas of visual representation of the anthropological 'other', drawing attention to the performativity and power relations between maker and subject inherent in the creation of any visual work. 'Ori mi pe', or 'my head is correct' in the English translation, is the name of a pattern that women draw on the indigo cloth traditionally worn by the Yoruba people, as a statement of their dignity as human beings. Contact: cristiana.strava [at] gmail.com |
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Somebody Like Me | Ashley Shuyler Running Time: 29 mins. Somebody Like Me follows Ngunina, a young Maasai woman who was the first in her village to go to secondary school, after she returns to her family home in Tanzania. As Ngunina tries to share her story with the filmmaker – who was also the American sponsor of Ngunina's education – the complex nature of their relationship is gradually revealed. By attending to the everyday activities of Ngunina and her family, framed by the interactions between filmmaker and subject, this nonfiction video observes those moments of discomfort–and simultaneous efforts toward empathy–that result when ethnography, "sponsorship," and friendship intersect. Contact: ashley.shuyler [at] gmail.com |
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Thirty Years More | Josh Neff Shot on a small fishing boat off the coast of southern California, Thirty Years More depicts a day in the lives of two aging divers who have persevered in a difficult and declining trade. Through a series of observational long takes focused on the labor of its subjects, the piece reveals the relationship of the men to the confined space of their boat, to each other, and to the sea. Contact: josh.a.neff [at] gmail.com |
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works 2007 |
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Charlotte, Tien, and the Class | Troy Montserrat-Gonzales Charlotte, Tien, and the Class eavesdrops on five-year-old Charlotte and her family's experience adopting a little girl from China as Charlotte negotiates her understanding of the adoption, her new family structure, and her relationship with the sensory ethnography class vis-à-vis the camera. Contact: montserr [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Kale and Kale | Stephanie Spray Kale and Kale is an observational work that explores the subtle everyday interactions and relationships among an uncle and nephew, both nicknamed “Kale,” or “black one,” and their families in rural Nepal. The roles they play in the village, with their families, and outside of the village are gradually revealed by way of discrete vignettes. Through the pacing of the scenes and the length of shots, this ethnographic video is also a depiction of time and its passing in rural Nepal. The work invites the viewer to engage unhurriedly and sensorially with its subjects and their environment. Contact: sspray [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Luchando | Noelle Stout Luchando follows a day in the life of four Cuban hustlers—a travesti, a lesbiana, and two pingueros—who set out to resolve their touching and at-times humorous predicaments in Havana’s gay underground. Luchando takes place in the last days of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, a late-socialist nation schizophrenically torn between the ideals of socialist equality and a rapidly growing division between the rich and poor. The film’s title 'luchando' has historically meant the fight for Cuba’s socialist revolution, but has become a slang term that hustlers use to describe their sexual encounters with clients. Shot in verite style over the course of a year, Luchando refuses sensationalism and instead emphasizes the subjective and experiential qualities of everyday life. The film explores the ambiguity of cultural categories such as 'homosexual' and 'hustler' that are continually renegotiated by the film’s subjects. Through a long-term, intimate engagement with the characters Luchando humanizes the sex trade in Havana by presenting characters who are at once vulnerable and in-control, affectionate and opportunistic, and whose ultimate strength comes from the bonds they share with one another. http://luchandofilm.com |
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Royal, Nebraska | Toby Lee and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga A short video portrait of a quiet town in rural Middle America, Royal, Nebraska is also a study of how the durational medium of the moving image can articulate the relationship between space and time. Formally experimental, playing with framing and long takes, the video addresses the way in which place and public space in this small town can be defined temporally, as well as spatially and socially, and the role of the camera in that process. Contact: fotini [at] post.harvard.edu / tobylee [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Songhua | JP Sniadecki Songhua depicts the intimate and complex relationship between Harbin residents and their “mother river," the Songhua in northeastern China. By attending to the everyday activities of leisure and labor unfolding along the banks and promenade, this nonfiction video also explores the interface between aesthetics and ethnography as it addresses environmental crisis within a major waterway of China. Contact: jpsniad [at] fas.harvard.edu |
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Still Life | Diana Keown Allan Still Life examines the role that a series of personal photos that survived the 1948 displacement play in the life of Said, an elderly Palestinian from Acre now living in exile in Lebanon. The importance of preserving these intimate remnants of a history now largely invisible within a larger global frame of reference cannot be underestimated as Palestine as a historical signifier is in danger of losing it’s signified. Palestine as it was before 1948 has ceased to exist; Acre is no longer a Palestinian port and the other histories of this city now circulate as highly personal, scattered memories. The photographs, around which this piece is structured, are not simply souvenirs or representations, but for their owner function as imprints of Palestine that still carry material traces of places and people from the past within them. For Said, they have become objects of affective transference, evoking memories that remain crucial to his present sense of self––sacred objects that record another history of relation and belonging. Still Life is the first segment of a video triptych that explores the different ways in which memory is being mediated among Palestinians in Lebanon. Contact: dallan [at] fas.harvard.edu \ www.nakba-archive.org |