Gomorra and Frozen River

It happens that a small “arthouse” (?) cinema in central Amsterdam is simultaneously screening two award-winning feature films that are in one way or another about illegal Chinese migration: Frozen River, a quite lyrical film about two women smuggling people from Canada to the US through an Indian reservation to make ends meet, and Gomorra, based on Roberto Saviano’s bestseller, in which the Camorra works with Chinese crime syndicates to bring in “slave labour”. Although both films reflect the general obsession with this trope, the way in which it is presented is very different.  

In Frozen River, everybody — perhaps even the migrants themselves, two of whom curse at the women because they don’t trust women drivers — have individual motives; there don’t seem to be either dupes or villains in the story (though the idea that somebody would pay $40 thousand to be smuggled into what they perceive is a struggling country strikes the women as crazy). Gomorra, by contrast, is full of victims, villains and heroes, and seems to be very much in sync with Italy’s current political trends that are more anti-immigrant, anti-South (I mean Italy’s South) and pro-strongman than probably at any time since World War II.

Call for films/photo documentaries on the multicultural city

The Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa has just put out a call for video and photo presentations on the theme of the ‘multicultural city’.  Sounds like an exciting venture.  Here are the details:

Diversity in Place: Making Documentaries on the Multicultural City April 24th, 2009
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

More than half of the population in the world now lives in cities, and the urban share of the globe will continue to increase dramatically to reach 70 percent by 2050. Migration, both from within and among societies, is a major source of urbanization, with multicultural cities on the rise everywhere.

Call for Documentary Film/Video Entries

In an innovative way toward mutual learning, we invite the submission of video and photo documentaries whose emphasis is on exploring multicultural cities and processes of place-making. Scholars, teachers, students and practitioners alike are searching for alternative methods to conventional data analysis and academic writing to be able to capture ethnic diversity and multicultural interactions in real world settings. The use of documentaries to show the daily practices of multiculturalism in the city can make several key contributions to research, teaching and action.

Videos not in excess of 15 minutes are requested for submission to screenings which will be held at the conference venue at the University of Hawai’i Manoa Campus on April 24th, 2009. Selections of videos to be included in the seminar will be made by a committee of students and faculty who are organizing the event. Artists, video- and filmmakers, researchers, writers and others interested in the relation between people and places and the making of multicultural cities are invited to join the project, participate to the seminar to discuss their ideas and work.

Questions, themes, topics and issues to be addressed in the documentaries can include, but are not limited to:

* How documentaries by recoding the presence of people of different origins over time can reveal ‘invisible’ minority cultures in a way that no other media can.
* The efforts at historic preservation of elements of the city that might otherwise have been overlooked but are of high cultural value to members of a community.
* How multiculturalism can work well in practice and thus contribute to a more positive attitude about and pride in the multicultural city, and thereby assist in fostering mutual accommodation and tolerance.
* In an age of global migration in which significant segments of multicultural cities do not have citizenship or are otherwise marginalized in the city, how documentaries can help identify issues of social justice.
* How multiculturalism inscribes itself into the city by everyday uses of urban space and lead us to a greater appreciation of the many different identities that make up the multicultural Cosmopolis of contemporary times.

By combining the reflections and findings emerging around the objectives of the conference, and understanding the inevitability of increasing diversity in urban places, this conference aims at drawing lessons and recommendations as to what makes the creation of ethnic spaces possible, and further what helps to form and shape livable cities with healthy intercultural relations, namely, cities as multicultural places where migrants’ place-making is understood and acknowledged as an inherent human right to the city.

This conference is sponsored by the Student Equity, Excellence and Diversity Initiative (SEED), University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Submission Deadline and Guidelines

The purpose of the call is a selection of a maximum of eight documentaries to be screened in a one-day conference on April 24th, 2009 at the University of Hawai’i.

Submission deadline: March 1st, 2009

Guidelines

Videos should be short — no longer than 15.00 minutes. International and Domestic submissions are encouraged.
The formats accepted are: DVD
Please include: Synopsis, Bio, CV and Contact Information. All submissions will be added to the Diversity in Place Video Library for possible inclusion in future projects. If included in other projects, artists will be contacted for permission.

Send submissions to:

Vera Zambonelli, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Saunders Hall, 2424 Maile Way, 96822 Honolulu HI

Travel and lodging aid:
Pending application, the Project will cover part of travel expenses and lodging in a Youth Hostel for participants residing outside of Honolulu. If traveling to Honolulu is not an option, we will arrange videoconferencing through skype.

For more information: diversityinplace@gmail.com
http://diversityinplace.wordpress.com/

Video contest: intercultural dialogue

Well, after something of a hiatus I intend to get more active with the posting from now on.

First of all, here is an announcement I just noticed on the Intersections blog about an online video competition with the theme “Intercultural Dialogue”.  Perhaps there are some young visual anthropologists who would like to put in an entry.

Xenoclipse, the group hosting the competition, can be accessed here.

Jovan Maud

Temple of Dreams screening at Macquarie

With a proposed new Islamic school facing strong community opposition in the Sydney suburb of Camden, it is timely that the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie is screening a new documentary called Temple of dreams. The film portrays similar challenges faced by a group of young Australian Muslims attempting to set up a youth centre in Sydney. Details about the film and the screening are below:

*Free screening*

Introduced by the director, Tom Zubrycki

(Molly and Mobarak, The Diplomat, Billal),

and followed by a post-screening Q&A discussion.

Temple of Dreams follows a group of Lebanese Australians who set up an Islamic youth centre in Western Sydney. The documentary – by one of Australia’s leading documentary film makers – follows the group’s battle against the local council to keep the centre open, and their struggle to fit into the wider community.

When: Wednesday 14 November

Time: 4-6pm

Place: Building C5C Room 498 (Enter via Research Hub EAST), Macquarie University

RSVP: By 12 November 2007 to crsi@scmp.mq.edu.au or on 02 9850 9171

**FREE**

Please spread the word to your colleagues and friends – download event flyer here.

For more information about the film, click here, or visit

http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/temple-dreams

“Forbidden Lies”: An Eye-Opener Documentary Especially For the Western Men and Women Obsessed with the Horror Stories From the Middle East

       Forbidden Lies, a documentary by the Australian filmmaker Anna Broinowski, is now at the movies (www.palacecinemas.com.au). The documentary is about Norma Khouri, who published a memoir Forbidden Love in 2003 about her life story in Jordan and the honour killing of her best friend Dalia; her young Muslim friend was killed by her father and brothers who found out that she was secretly dating a man. Norma Khouri (born in 1970) published the book as ‘a true story’; and said she had fled Jordan out of fear of persecution and had written the book at internet cafes in Greece. The book became a best-seller; only in Australia it sold more than 200,000 copies; and Norma became a human-rights celebrity overnight touring the world to talk about honour killings in Jordan and in the Middle East. She introduced herself as ‘a virgin-refugee’, and got so much support from her readers, high-profile politicians and intellectuals all around the world. She got probably a refugee visa to settle in Australia. Australians-a society which doesn’t respect its indigenous people much and which keeps some poor refugees including children in detention centres- welcomed her almost with a red carpet and embraced her. An Australian singer composed a special song for Norma and all the honour-killing victims; some people helped her start a campaign against honour killings.

In 2004 , the Australian journalist Malcolm Knox found out that Norma’s story was fake. Norma was actually a US citizen; she was born in Jordan, and migrated to the US with her family when she was three years old (she has a strong American accent but she made people believe that she developed her accent when she studied in the US for a couple of years). And she was no virgin, but married with two children. Also she was sought after by the FBI because of defrauding people of money in the US.

The filmmaker Anna Broinowski interviews many people including Norma herself, her husband, some people in Australia who supported her including an Australian writer, her publishers, genuine human rights activists in Jordan ( a lawyer and journalist who generally work quietly and diligently to bring a stop to honour killings), someone from the FBI and the Australian journalist Malcolm Knox who revealed Norma was fake etc. And Anna Broinowski asks her audience to decide whether Norma is a con-artist or not? (Norma still insists her story was geniune, and doesn’t want to reclassify it as fiction).

Isn’t Norma’s success actually a matter of supply and demand? We all know that the books and films about the ‘battered-raped’ Muslim women by ‘fierce and cruel’ Muslim Middle Eastern men’ sell a lot in Western countries; these stories almost sell as much as ‘sex’! Norma was probably smart enough to take notice of this demand and swiftly exploited it. And actually isn’t she only a small entrepreneur who wanted to make a couple of million dollars compared to George W.Bush, John Howard etc. and the big entrepreneurs who have made billions of dollars out of the war in the Middle East based on bigger lies about the Weapons of Mass Destruction which have never been discovered?

What interests me most actually isn’t Norma the con-artist and her fake story; there has always been con-artists and there’ll be more; but ‘the sick minds’ and ‘the sick imagination’ of the Western men and women who are obsessed with and thrilled by these stories. I wonder what Freud would have said about ‘this sick obsession’ if he had been alive and had psychoanalysed the Western mind?

No sensible person from Muslim background can deny the honour killings which happen generally in poor-feudal-patriarchal parts of some Muslim countries; it doesn’t happen to all Muslim women, but to the ones with no social and economic power who have to live at the mercy of men. I wonder if Norma’s story has in any way helped improve the situation of these women; though the genuine female human rights activists are quietly and diligently doing the hard work and trying to make a difference in these countries.

I wonder if the same Western men and women are paying the same attention to the maybe millions of young African women who have died due to AIDS and left their infants and young children behind! Or has Norma drawn so much attention because she was bringing some bad news about the West’s ideological enemy (Islam) and making the Christian liberal Western consumers feel smug and superior about their values and lifestyles?

Don’t miss this film, it’s a very good documentary! And by the way, according to the film Norma Khouri is planning to become a human rights lawyer; watch out!

Popular/izing anthropology

Strong over at Savage Minds recently noted that anthropology and anthropologists are appearing quite a bit in popular culture of late. The film rendition of The Nanny Diaries has the main character as a recent graduate of anthropology with an essentially useless degree who regards her experience working for the Upper East Side elite with some of the analytic eye of an anthropologically trained participant-observer. Coincidentally (or not?), another recent release, Fierce People, follows a teenage boy who had planned to go live with his anthropologist dad in the Amazon but who instead gets stuck spending the summer with the ridiculously wealthy in New Jersey. He decides to regard it as fieldwork and carefully takes notes on the manners and customs of this exotic tribe. In an interview, Dirk Wittenborn (who wrote the novel on which the movie was based) elaborates: “I’ve always thought of the very wealthy as a tribe. They have unspoken rules they don’t tell you, so the rest of us have to play by rules we don’t understand. It’s like a Martian bridge game.”

I’ve seen neither film, but it is worth noting that the best-selling book version of the Nanny Diaries did not style the main character as an aspiring anthropologist (whoops, did I just confess to having read it?). So the device of the anthropologist protagonist does seem to be a Hollywood strategy for signaling the cultural distance between “us” (? — I guess the non-wealthy, non-elite movie-going public) and “them” within our own society. Or, as Strong puts it more eloquently, the use of the anthropologist figure “play[s] on the conceit of reflexive defamiliarization or ironic self-otherization.”

In some circuits, though, the popular face of anthropology remains Margaret Mead, nearly 80 years after Coming of Age in Samoa was published, and even though Clifford Geertz was, before his death last year, on many lists of top 100 world intellectuals. In Slate.com, Alan Greenspan was recently described as “Margaret Mead in a pinstripe suit” to make some point about Greenspan acknowledging the human (by which they mean ‘irrational’) side of the economy. Is it just a generational thing that gives us a clue about the journalist’s (or perhaps the headline-writer’s) age? How long will Mead remain the public face of anthropology?

L.L. Wynn

New film on Australian asylum seeker policy

I just received news of a new film on Australia’s policy of detaining asylum seekers.  Looks like it would be worth a watch.

Screenings to be happening in Melbourne and Perth (see below). I wonder if it will be coming to Sydney any time soon? Here is the film’s blurb:

In 2006, a group of young people of different nationalities, backgrounds, attitudes and political views took a trip to the Baxter Detention Centre. The stories of the people they met behind the razor wire surprised, moved and challenged them.

“WE WILL BE REMEMBERED FOR THIS” documents their journey. It is a film for everyone. It is a clear, rational and nonpoliticised look at the human issues of Australia’s mandatory immigration detention policy. This film poses the essential questions surrounding Australia’s refugee policy. Who are the people behind the fences? How did they come to be there? What are the psychological and legal battles they now face? How much do average Australians know about this policy, and if they knew the truth, would they want it to change?

The Justice Project is proud to sponsor the world premiere of “We Will be Remembered for This”, a film about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers in recent years.

‘CINE-ETHNOGRAPHY : JEAN ROUCH’

     I have been reading Cine-Ethnography: Jean Rouch (2003), a book which consists of essays by and interviews with Jean Rouch, the master anthropologist and filmmaker, on anthropology, ethnography, cinema, filmmaking and Africa. Steven Feld, professor of anthropology and music at Columbia University, translated Rouch’s work from French, and edited the book.     

    Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917, and he studied mathematics and engineering. In 1941, during the war, he went to Niger, then a French colony, as an engineer. He was responsible for building roads and bridges, and was in charge of twenty thousand laborers. While building roads he began to study possession among the Songhay. When he returned to France, he decided to take a doctorate in anthropology. His interest in African culture resulted in more than one hundred ethnographic films with “cinema-direct” style on colonialism, racism, African modernity, religious ritual and music; and a life-long ethnographic work in Western Africa until his death in an automobile accident in Niger in 2004. 

    As a ethnographer-filmmaker, Jean Rouch’s attitude to ethnography was very much influenced by his role as a filmmaker. He says on ethnography (p:100):       

   “These critical reflections on the self of the filmmaker lead me to expand on the concept of the self of the ethnographer.     

     In the field, the observer modifies himself; in doing his work, he is no longer simply someone who greets the elders at the edge of the village, but-to go back to Vertovian terminology-he ethno-looks, ethno-observes, ethno-thinks. And those with whom he deals are similarly modified; in giving their confidence to this habitual foreign visitor, they ethno-show, ethno-speak, ethno-think.       

      It is this permanent ethno-dialogue that appears to be one of the most interesting angles in the current progress of ethnography. Knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, devoured in the Western temples of knowledge; it is the result of an endless quest where ethnographers and those whom they study meet on a path that some of us now call “shared anthropology”. “(1973)        

     It is an excellent book if you want to explore on Jean Rouch’s ethnographic film and ethnographic work in Africa; French colonialism, anthropology and cinema, and the history of African cinema.

New film on young Australian Muslims

I just receive an announcment about a new film called Temple of Dreams, about young Australian Muslims in Sydney’s west. Directed by Tom Zubrycki, it will be premiering in the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday 16 June at the State Theatre. Here is the description of the film from the brochure:

Fadi Rahman is one of a new breed of Australian Muslim leaders. Young, charismatic and politically ambitious, he runs a youth centre/gymnasium in Sydney’s west in what was once a Masonic Temple. The Centre struggles in the face of council planning regulations and funding shortfalls. Fadi sets out to solve all their problems with the help of three determined but often argumentative young women – Alyah, Amna and Zouhour. First up to raise funds he flies out former rap star, turned born-again Muslim, Napoleon. Next, he and his trusty team organise a youth conference to discuss the problems young Muslims face in Australia. This event is much bigger than anything they’ve attempted before, and the stress is taking it’s toll. Meanwhile the Council deadline is looming, with the threat of closure imminent. Will the Conference succeed? Will the Centre survive? This is a story told from the inside revealing Muslim Australians in a way that dispels stereotypes of a vilified and victimised minority.

Click here more info on the film and the Sydney Film Festival.

Multiculturalism in movies

These days not only social anthropologists and sociologists, but also film-makers are dealing with ‘multiculturalism’ in their projects. Mira Nair is one of those filmmakers. In her latest film ‘The Namesake’ she tells the story of a family who goes to the US from India to start a new life. Below is the full review from http://hoyts.ninemsn.com.au/movie/2254.asp

‘Spanning two generations, two clashing cultures and two very different ways of life, THE NAMESAKE is the latest film by Mira Nair, the acclaimed director of MONSOON WEDDING and VANITY FAIR. In her most personal film to date, Nair brings to the screen a poignant and transporting version of Jhumpa Lahiri’s best-selling novel, which won reader’s hearts across the world with its exploration of the ties that can both tangle and bind global families.

Jumping between the equally colourful and vibrant cities of Calcutta and New York, THE NAMESAKE is a moving drama which follows the Ganguli family, who come to the U.S. from India in order to experience a world of limitless opportunities – only to be confronted with the perils and confusion of trying to build a meaningful life in a baffling new society. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima (Indian stars Irrfan Khan and Tabu) jet off from sweltering Calcutta to a wintry New York where they begin their new life together. Virtual strangers to one another and with Ashima now living in a new and very strange land, their relationship takes a positive turn when Ashima gives birth to a son. Under pressure to name him quickly, Ashoke settles on Gogol, after the famous Russian author – a name that serves as a link to a secret past and, Ashoke hopes, a better future.

As a first-generation American teenager, Gogol (Kal Penn) must learn to tread a razor-thin line between his Bengali roots and his American birthright in the search for his own identity. It’s a difficult journey, full of both comic and painfully revelatory consequences . . . until Gogol begins to see the links between the world his parents left behind and the new world that lies in front of him. ‘