films
A Film about the Teesta
Minket Lepcha, a woman from Darjeeling, has devoted several years to promoting and protecting the Teesta River through her skills as a filmmaker. A news story published on May 10 in EastMojo, an online news platform from northeastern India, provided details about the film she has produced and the effects it is having on audiences. […]
Ifaluk Atoll Has an Uncertain Future
A prominent educator from Massachusetts spent some time on Ifaluk Island 40 years ago so now he has decided to return there to live out the rest of his life. John Chittick was born and raised in the small city of Fitchburg, completed an Ed.D. from Harvard, and went on to have a career as […]
Searching for Life in the Kalahari
Opaletswe, a young San man, tells Daniel Koehler at New Xade that even though he is poor, “when you dance, you feel like you are very rich.” Koehler has posted three new entries to his blog about the G/wi and the G//ana people living in New Xade, the resettlement community in western Botswana where he […]
A New Blog about the G/wi
The San living in the desert of Botswana are still strongly attached to the land, Daniel Koehler wrote last week, a value which they hope their children will embrace. Koehler is one of five grantees chosen from a field of 864 people who applied for a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. He is living with […]
Inuit Filmmaking Struggles
Igloolik Isuma Productions, the company that explored Inuit conceptions of evil, violence and forgiveness with the award-winning film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, has filed for bankruptcy. The company had borrowed $750,000 from an accounting firm in Montreal and it can’t repay the debt. This has put their entire film archive into the hands of a […]
Inuit Perceptions of Climate Change: New Documentary Film
The Museum of the American Indian in Washington will host the first U.S. showing this weekend of the new documentary film “Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change.” The Inuktitut language production, with English subtitles, was developed by Zacharias Kunuk, the well-known director of the prize-winning film “Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner,” along with Ian Mauro, a scholar […]
Appraisal of John Marshall’s Ju/’hoansi Films (journal article review)
The significance of John Marshall’s life is not so much that he made accurate films about the Ju/’hoansi, as that he returned, again and again, to film the same people so he could effectively tell their stories. For 50 years, beginning in the early 1950s, Marshall chronicled their lives, capturing with his films, which were […]
Ladakhi Film Industry Portrayed in New Documentary
The Ladakhi film industry, which was described recently in a major newspaper article, has now been portrayed in an Indian documentary film called “Out of Thin Air.” According to a review in The Hindu last week, the new documentary shows how the Ladakhi films portray “the landscape and its people in the harsh attractiveness of […]
Ladakhi Movies
Ladakhis have gotten into making films, about their own society of course, and everyone seems to be getting into the act. Buddhist monks are writing screenplays, cops and taxi drivers are playing key roles, and crowds are pouring into opening night showings in Leh, the district capital. Bollywood is being banished. Ladakhis are determined to […]
Ju/’hoansi Film Archive Honored by UNESCO
The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, has announced that the John Marshall archive of Ju/’hoansi film and video has been added to the Memory of the World Register. His recent decision, following a nomination by a panel of experts, adds 35 documents, collections and archives to the UNESCO listing, which now includes 193 works in […]
