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. ‘