Documentary Educational Resources - Geography / South America / Argentina / All Films

Fireland Dogs

Fri, 10 May 2019 10:31:52 GMT

Fireland Dogs (Perros del Fin del Mundo) addressesArgentina's feral dog population and raises important questions about the humanrole in domestication and neglect of animals. For decades, dog owners have beenabandoning their pets throughout the rural countryside of Tierra del Fuego,where sheep farming sustains much of the local economy. Without proper care andcontrol, the dogs run rampant throughout the island's towns and farms, killinglivestock, causing public health concern, and threatening its ecosystem andwildlife.

The film includes interviews with farmers, veterinarians,and activists who are working to combat the dog's increasingly problematicpresence. Their efforts to curb the situation include public education schemes,responsible adoption and neutering initiatives, and in the most extreme cases,legislating to categorize the dogs as an invasive species which allows them tobe hunted and killed. While some invoke animal ethics and advocate for anon-violent approach, others insist that sheep deserve as much protection andcare as the dogs.

Fireland Dogs expertly broaches attitudes about pets, thehuman footprint, and our inclination to place more value on certain animalsover others. Addressing economic, health, and environmental concerns, the filmultimately concludes that the future of Tierra del Fuego will be at risk untila sustainable, community-led solution is determined.

"Fireland Dogs is a heartbreaking film detailing the economic, ecological and public health devastation caused by these growing dog packs. This film is highly recommended for academic libraries, as well as public library collections for adults."
-Kimberly A. Plassche, Map Librarian, Liaison to Geography, University at Buffalo

SELECTED SCREENINGS AND AWARDS

Earthvision Feature Award, Santa Cruz Film Festival, 2018

Cine Ambiental de la Patagonia, 2018
Puerto Madryn International Film Festival, 2018
National Broadcast, Argentina, 2018

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Cartoneros

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Cartoneros
Buy Now: $320.00

Cartoneros follows the paper recycling process in Buenos Aires from the trash pickers who collect paper informally through middlemen in warehouses, to executives in large corporate mills. The process exploded into a multimillion dollar industry after Argentina's latest economic collapse. The film is both a record of an economic and social crisis and an invitation to audiences to rethink the value of trash. Visit the film's official website: http://cartonerosdoc.com

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Cochengo Miranda

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Cochengo Miranda
Buy Now: $320.00

Cochengo Miranda is a portrait of a farmer and his family living in the Pampas region of Central Argentina. Made by Jorge Prelorán, Argentina's best-known documentary filmmaker, the film is an example of his unique genre of ethnobiography, in which the story of an individual reveals larger truths about a culture and way of life.

The extensive region of the Pampas in Central Argentina is one of the most fertile in the world. However, as the rains subside towards the West, the land becomes arid and dry. Here live a sparse population of rugged cattlemen whose nearest neighbor may be 10 miles away. The center of life is a well and a windmill to which the cattle come every day to drink, and then go off to find the scarce grasses in the vast plains where no fences are necessary.

Cochengo Miranda has lived here for over 30 years, and raised his family after marrying at 45. In his youth he had been an itinerant singer and ranch hand, but hung up his guitar when he finally settled down. He is descendant from early Spanish stock in the region, where many of its traditions are still kept alive even though transculturation is rapidly taking its toll.

During a whole year Prelorán visited this family several times, filming a variety of occurrences that took place as the months and seasons passed. In each occasion he would record extensive monologues of don Cochengo as the basis for the film's structure. The result is a warm, intimate portrait of life in a little-known region of the world, as told to us by the settlers themselves.

This is the style of film that Prelorán has developed through the years based on the limitations of his equipment and budgets. He shot with a spring-wound 16mm Bolex camera, which accounts for the short length of the takes. He did not possess sync-sound equipment, so the soundtracks were later constructed painstakingly in order to give the impression that they are real. Because he could not record dialogues between his characters, he had to devise a style which appeared to be professional; so he used voice-over monologues. Thus his films are narrated by the protagonists themselves, conveying their feelings, wishes, philosophy and manners of expression, in order to complement the visuals rather than to just document what we see, or to be told by 'experts' how these people act or think, as is so common in ethnographic film.

It is interesting to point out that Prelorán does not consider his films pure ethnography, for he does not work with a scientific method nor is he interested in documenting material anthropology. He is more intent on capturing the human soul in its infinite varieties, and does not consider re-staging scenes for the camera a problem, if they are essentially truthful and do not call attention to themselves.

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Homage to the Yaghans

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Homage to the Yaghans
Buy Now: $295.00

Homage to the Yaghans was filmed with 16mm cameras in Tierra del Fuego and the Cape Horn area (Chile and Argentina) during the summer of 1987 and the winter of 1988. It was first presented in the United States at the New York Academy of Sciences in early 1990.

The video's purpose is twofold. The first is to achieve an understanding of certain episodes of western expansion, beginning in the early seventeenth century, which finally led to the extinction of the Yaghan people. The second is to gain an appreciation of the courage and fortitude of a people who had survived for thousands of years in one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet, but who had been judged by many Europeans as the most degraded human beings in the entire world.

Homage focuses on the personality and life of a Yaghan called "Jemmy Button" who was taken to England in 1831 by Captain Fitz-Roy and returned to his homeland two years later during Fitz-Roy's second expedition, in the company of Charles Darwin. Jemmy Button died in 1864, a victim of the first in a series of epidemics which decimated his people. The video ends with scenes of the four women who still speak Yaghan (as well as Spanish) and who live on Navarino Island, on the south shore of Beagle Channel in Chile. One of the four Yaghan-speaking women vividly remembers witnessing the last enactment of the great initiation ceremony, the Chiexaus, held on Navarino Island circa 1932.

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The Ona People

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:51:00 GMT

The Ona People
Buy Now: $320.00

Tierra del Fuego, "land of fire," was first visited by Europeans early in the sixteenth century. A group of islands that had separated from the southern tip of the South American mainland long ago, Tierra del Fuego had probably been inhabited by different groups of Indians for at least 9000 years. The largest island in the zone, the "Great Island," now divided between Chile and Argentina, was the homeland of the Selk'nam Indians, sometimes known as the Ona. Until their genocide began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there were between 3500 and 4000 Ona on the island. In 1919, Father Martin Gusinde counted fewer then 300, and by 1930 less than 100 Ona remained. By 1977, when this film was released, Angela, the last full-blooded Ona Indian, had died.

From the sixteenth until the end of the nineteenth century, shipwrecked sailors were the only Europeans with whom the Ona had encounters with. During those centuries the Indians continued to live by hunting, gathering, and fishing. The guanaco, a species of "American camel," provided not only meat but also hides and furs for tents and warm clothing. Roots, berries, mushrooms, and eggs were collected by the women, and at times seals and stranded whales provided additional food. Groups consisted of from 40 to 120 individuals who shared a defined territory. They had no chiefs, but rather wise men known as "fathers of the word," and shamans skilled in healing, in trance, and in other forms of spiritual power.

Kiepja, or Lola as she was known in Spanish, was such a shaman. She was almost ninety when ethnographer Anne Chapman met her in 1964. Impressed by the shamanic chants that Kiepja sang, Chapman returned in 1966 to spend three months with her, recording almost 100 chants of mourning and of shamanic and other rituals. At this time, Chapman began to reconstruct genealogies with Kiepja and to draw out her recollections of the past, communicating partly in Spanish and partly in Selk'nam. Kiepja died on October 9, 1966, in the government hospital at Rio Grande, at the end of an unusually cold winter. During the following years, Chapman continued her study with another Indian woman, Angela Loij. Angela was then the only surviving Ona (she died in 1974), and she knew a great deal about the culture of her ancesters, despite the fact that she was born at the turn of the century when the Ona were rapidly being destroyed. Chapman, encouraged by producer-director Ana Montes de Gonzales, decided to make a documentary film despite the death of Kiepja.

Much of the film is based on Angela's accounts of the past and her reflections on the present, as well as on the recollections of several mestizo Indians. Interviews are combined with a wealth of old photographs to reconstruct the tragic history of the destruction of the Ona. Beginning in the 1880s when Europeans first came to the island in search of gold, the story moves through the introduction of large-scale sheep farming, and the rapid genocide that ensued. The killings were managed by a diverse cast of characters, including a Romanian, a Spaniard, a Yugoslavian, a Portuguese, and perhaps most unforgettably, a Scotsman named McLellan but commonly known as "Red Pig." Red Pig paid a pound sterling for an Indian's ears, and slightly more for an Indian woman's breasts. It was, in his words, "too much trouble" to civilize these Indians.

In 1889, the narration tells us, a group of Ona was abducted to France to be displayed at an international exhibition, as "cannibals" in an iron cage. Nearly a century later, in 1968, Angela was brought, all expenses paid, to Buenos Aires. There she appeared on a television program as "Mrs. Angela," one of the last remaining Indians from the remotest corner of Argentina.

"And what do you do in your place of origin in Rio Grande?" asks the interviewer cheerfully.

"Nothing," she replies.

The film was inspired by Kiepja, dedicated to her, and framed by her images in still photographs and by her voice, chanting:

Here I am singing

The wind is carrying me

I am following the footsteps of those departed.

"All of us who participated in the making of this film intend that it serve the interests of peoples the world over who are presently menaced by the same sort of destruction the Onas suffered so relentlessly," Chapman wrote in 1977. "With the destruction of the Selk'nam not only did we annihilate our fellow human beings, enemies of no one, but we also lost a part of our heritage forever."

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Finalist, American Film Festival

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Seguir Siendo

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Seguir Siendo
Buy Now: $295.00

A portrait of the Mbyá-Guarani people living in Misiones, a subtropical province in Northeast Argentina. The people demonstrate everyday life existing on a geographical as well as a cultural border.

The filmmaker lives in Argentina and has produced Life at the Borderland (original Escenas de la Vida en el Borde) a series of films dealing with indigenous people living in the area of Argentina between Paraguay and Brazil. The series won a national contest, "Best Project for a Documentary TV Series", portraying everyday life at a particular "frontier space" in Northeast Argentina. Seguir Siendo is one of the four programs produced.

Suitable for teaching Anthropology, Ethnography, Globalization, Latin American Studies, Environmental Studies.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Best Anthropological Documentary, Best Audiovisual Approach, National Anthropological Institute Documentary Film and Video Festival, Argentina, 1999

GNT Prize to Language Renewal, International Festival of Ethnographical Films, Brazil, 1999

Best Cultural TV Program, Latin American Film and Video Contest, Argentina, 1999

Mention for Best Expressive Approach, Annual Argentine Video Festival, Argentina, 1999

Honorary Diploma for Ethnographical and Testimonial Interest, Spanish Association of Scientific Cinema

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Sol de Noche, La Historia De olga Y Luis

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Sol de Noche, La Historia De olga Y Luis
Buy Now: $320.00

In 1976, during the Argentine military dictatorship, an event called the Night of the Blackout occured in Ledesma. This blackout was a well coordinated connivance between the military government and powerful economic interests. During the blackout, 400 people who were deemed troublesome because of their activism either against the government or to improve working conditions at the Ledesma mill, were taken to clandestine detention centers. Many of them were never seen again. Ledesma, a producer of sugar, paper, and citrus fruit, one of the most important corporate empires in Argentina, led a cover-up of their involvement, but everyone in the town knew they were behind the blackout.

Much of the story is told through the reflection of Olga Aredez who lost her husband, a beloved doctor, during these events. This is a human rights story as well as political history. It is extremely important in helping to understand the economic, political and social situation in Argentina today.

Because of the dramatic storytelling it has the feel of a feature film.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

1st Prize Festival Internacional Tres Continentes, 2003

National Production Award, Festival de Video Documental, Argentina 2002

Tiburon International Film Festival, California, 2004

Award of Excellence, Society for Visual Anthropology/American Anthropological Association Conference, Chicago, 2004

Vermont International Film Festival, Burlington, 2004

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Subtango, The Spirit of Tango

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Subtango, The Spirit of Tango
Buy Now: $320.00

A journey to the Buenos Aires underground tango culture, where the elusive soul of tango is to be found… Even after a century of history, after enshrinement as the national music, after rampant commercialization and packaging for export, the tango still speaks to the Argentine soul. Subtango shows how tango music, dance, art and poetry are an essential part of the emotional expression of regular people, featuring the gamblers, ramblers and barroom prophets of the Buenos Aires night, playing weather-beaten accordions and singing old tangos of heartbreak and resentment. Through interviews with the citizens of this subterranean world, the film expands on the tango’s lugubrious aesthetic, the origins of its melodramatic lyrics in the laments of alienated immigrants, the sensuality and profound communication of its dance. The film explores the faded old bars where the nightcrawlers of Buenos Aires come to dance and drink amidst the peeling paint and thick clouds of smoke. Subtango is a portrait of that world of tango that lies closest to the true meaning of what tango is in Argentina.

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Traces and Memory of Jorge Prelorán

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

Traces and Memory of Jorge Prelorán
Buy Now: $320.00

Jorge Prelorán filmed a genre of his own, ethno-biographies, for more than twenty years. By focusing on one character and following him or her for a period of time, Prelorán achieved profound portraits that express the particular vision of the world of different people. Traces is an ethno-biography, but in this case, the character is Prelorán himself, and the director a disciple of his.

The movie unravels the life of Jorge Prelorán, the way he did with his own characters. From a childhood signed by asthma problems, a high class family and a strict education to becoming a man who changed the cinema, creating a new genre.

Director Statement: “Making this film was an excuse to be near Jorge. As he used to say "I don't choose the characters, they choose me." I also feel that, at some point, Jorge chose me. Getting to meet Jorge was a turning point; living with him, reuniting with a teacher who inspires and transmits his creativity fever. An entrenched humanist, who did not lose faith in the human condition.

This movie is the result of the friendship and the affection, the living together, the time and the learning from a master. I shot this movie for five years in six provinces of Argentina, and three countries. We accompanied Jorge through different places and with different characters, always working on his projects despite the illness he carried till the moment of his death.” — Fermín Rivera

"Two words come to my head when I think (of) Traces: respect and sensitivity. Fermín approached Jorge's life and thought with tremendous respect and a great dose of sensitivity."
-- Mabel Prelorán

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Special Mention, Tarapacá Film Festival, Chile, 2011

Special Mention, Argentinian Film Festival La Sudestada, France, 2011

Best Documentary Award, Montevideo Int'l Film Festival, Uruguay, 2011

Special Mention, Art Section, Festival of Ibero American Films, Mexico, 2011

People's Choice Award, Punta del Este Film Festival, Uruguay, 2011

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Argentinian Lesson

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 13:31:00 GMT

Argentinian Lesson
Buy Now: $320.00

With lush and intimate photography, Wojciech Staroń documents his family's move from Poland to Argentina. Struggling to adapt in a foreign country, his 8-year-old son Janek finds a friend in Marcia, a grounded 11-year-old Argentinean of Polish descent. With a strength and determination well beyond her years, Marcia must help make ends meet while holding her family together.

In this uniquely cross-cultural and universal coming-of-age story, Janek and Marcia go on adventures throughout the Argentinian countryside together finding work and exploring the beauty of nature around them. Janek's eagerness and Marcia's tenacity make them two unforgettable characters in an unconventional love story that sees the innocence of childhood surrounded by the harsh realities of adulthood.

“Enthralling... as rewardingly rich, complex and heartbreaking as any fiction.”
— Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times

“Staron's gift for finding magical moments is simply breathtaking, giving the viewer an occasional dose of delicately observed humanity one expects from the great cinematic capturers of ethereal beauty and human foible (Burnette, Malick, Almendros etc.)”
— Brandon Harris, The Filmmaker Magazine

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Spotlight Award, Cinema Eye, 2013

Best Creative Documentary, MakeDox, Macedonia, 2012

Best Documentary Film Award, Chicago Polish Film Festival, USA, 2012

Grand Prize, Let's CEE Documentary Film Festival, Austria, 2012

Best International Medium-Length Film, RIDM, Canada 2012

Golden Horn for the Director of the Best Film, Krakow Film Festival, Poland, 2011

Award of the Polish Association of Cinematographers(PSC), Krakow Film Festival, Poland, 2011

Documentary Fortnight, MoMA, USA, 2012

The Best Director Prize, Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Italy, 2011

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