Diverse frames
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Films for Freedom and the American Museum of Natural History screened seven films as part of their festival
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UNUSUAL ANGLES Scenes from some of the films at the Margaret Mead fest
Underaged Chinese girls work overtime at a factory; West-African feminist lawyers encourage women to fight for their rights and a German, a Palestinian and an Israeli photographer shoot under fire. Films for Freedom (Vikalp Bangalore) and the America
n Museum of Natural History screened seven such diverse films as part of the Margaret Mead Film Travelling Film Festival over last weekend. Margaret Mead (1901-79) was an American cultural anthropologist who used photography in anthropological research and wrote a number of ethnographies.
“China Blue” (2005) by Micha X. Peled did an insightful record of the mechanical lives of young girls at a denim factory – a blue example of cheap labour in Communist China. The documentation of a pregnant woman who lost her job because she has now ‘ceased’ to be efficient through black framed shots was imaginative. And thousand miles away in Mexico, “El Inmigrante” (2005) by David Eckenrode, John Sheedy and John Eckenrode had warm and cold interpretative frames shifting between the personal life of a Mexican illegal immigrant, Eusebio de Haro who was killed and the icy, racist feelings of the U.S Border Patrol and the Immigration Department in thwarting the great American Dream. Episodes of the Mexican immigrant issue in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Academy Award winner “Babel” (2006) were expounded in the crossing over of Mexicans through the desert, like the middle passage of the slave trade of Africans being transported to the U.S. Like the Africans, many of them don’t reach there alive – they are either tracked down by the Border Patrol or die of thirst and hunger. Flashes of Paul Haggis’ Academy Award winner “Crash” (2004) works in the way of killer Sam Blackwood, the archetypal Southerner.
What was amusing in depicting the religious fanaticism in the U.S was the witty “Flock of Dodos” (2006) by evolutionary biologist Randy Olson. Dodos, an extinct Mauritian flightless bird species which did not adapt to change on the arrival of Portuguese sailors who brought with them animals that hunted the birds down pop up as cartoons through the film. Filmmaker Olson follows a debate of the survival of the fittest in Southern U.S where Republicans preside over the education system and evolutionists fail to promote the controversial Darwinian theory.
“Shooting Under Fire: Inside Story of the Image Makers in Israel” (2005) by Sacha Mirzoeff and Bettina Borgfeld was powerfully evocative in trailing the uncertain lives of Reuters’ war photojournalists in the West Bank and Gaza strip. Interestingly, Reinhard Krause who is German, Ahmed Jadallah and Suhaib Salem, Palestinians and Nir Eviv, Israeli individually capture the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And in doing this, you see a telling story in the contrast between the high-standards of living of the Israelis in their posh localities and the deplorable standards of the Palestinians when the kids play in debris. The documentary explores the ‘ethics of journalism’ when Krause comments: “We can never put a gruesome picture – and when we don’t… it’s like we are cleaning up reality.” Talking of protestors, “We have to check if they’re doing it just because of the camera.” There are some light and serene moments in the media-frenzy of singer Madonna who comes to Israel and when the people seek distraction in a stroll to the sea-shore.
“Sisters-in-Law” (2005) by Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi was inspirational and uplifting in the way that the Women Lawyers’ Association in Kumba town, Cameroon in West Africa reaches out to empower their fellow-women in a sisterhood of sorts.
Moving cases of a woman seeking a divorce from her wife-beater and rapist husband, a six-year-old girl who escapes from her aunt’s physical abuse and a father who brings his daughter, a victim of rape, are captured in live court-hearings, with touches of humour and sarcasm in the way these determined lawyers mock the perpetrators.
“A Map with Gaps” (2006) by Alice Nelson was creative and ‘stranger than fiction’; by using archival grainy and animated shots in the abstract account of the journey of the director’s father through 1970s Soviet Russia.
“Today’s Man” (2006) by Lizzie Gottlieb, chronicles the life of Nicky, her autistic brother.
However, both could have done with some serious editing.
AYESHA MATTHAN
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