Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Biella, Peter / All Films

Maasai Migrants Series

Wed, 5 Sep 2018 11:07:00 GMT

Maasai Migrants Series
Buy Now: $320.00

The seven videos contained in this DVD were made in Tanzania between 2008 and 2010 by participants in the Maasai Migrants Field School, directed by Peter Biella of San Francisco State University's Program in Visual Anthropology. The primary purpose of the videos in the series is to educate urban and rural Maasai about the consequences of migration, especially its relationship to poverty and the spread of HIV. The films have been produced through a continuing collaboration with Maasai-led and other NGOs, and they are being screened and discussed in Maasai regions throughout Tanzania. Their purpose is to trigger emotional reactions that prompt viewers to engage in important — though otherwise rare and uncomfortable — conversations, about poverty, migration, and sexual practices. The series also constitutes a self-critical history of a project in applied anthropology and gives an example for applied practitioners who may wish to use video in their work.

About the films:

Maasai Migrants (Dir. Peter Biella, 22 min, 2008)

This is the first film completed in the Maasai Migrants Series, the multi-year collaborative exploration of applied anthropological videos contained in this DVD. Planned in close collaboration with Maasai organizers and local migrants, the film depicts the appalling conditions experienced by migrants in Dar es Salaam - the dangerous and underpaid work of night watchmen, and the tenuous existence of Maasai woman who, without male protection, are always at risk of exploitation. The video is divided into seven 3-minute vignettes, each giving a different facet of the Maasai community displaced by migration. Rich with data, the vignettes trigger audience discussions about the challenges of poverty and the push and pull of city life. A film about the scripting, shooting and screening of Maasai Migrants is recorded in Subject to Change, a video contained in this DVD. There, emphasis is placed on how the video has been understood by urban and rural Maasai viewers.

Subject to Change (Dir. Shamia Sandles, 21 min, 2009)

Subtitled A Freirean Case Study in Applied Visual Anthropology, this film presents the theoretical assumptions and screening strategy of films in the Maasai Migrants Series. It does so through a history of the Series' first season, the scripting, shooting and screening of Maasai Migrants (also contained on this DVD). Included in Subject to Change is documentary footage of meetings with production collaborators — an American professor and his student who made this film, Maasai night watchmen, homeless Maasai women, Maasai intellectuals and members of a Maasai-led NGO. These meetings reveal the development of the themes and documentary script of the film, and how they are designed to promote discussion among urban and prospective migrants living in rural homesteads. Subject to Change also provides an understanding of errors made by project members in choosing the wrong venues for screening and in failing to prepare post-screening facilitators for their task of promoting audience discussion after the showings. Finally, Subject to Change presents footage of four post-screening events in different locations — a church, an urban market, a school and a rural homestead. The analysis of Maasai Migrants' goals and strategy, supplemented by Maasai viewers' subtle comments on the film, reveal a great potential for an applied visual anthropology.

Maasai Speak Out on HIV and AIDS (Dir. Biella; research & footage by Thomas Sengale, 13 min, 2009)

Ilmurran is the most-frequently screened trigger film in the Maasai Migrants repertoire. Like the others, its goal is to provide critical education to displaced Maasai throughout Tanzania. When the film is screened with a skilled discussion facilitator, it allows an unprecedented opportunity for Maasai audiences to reflect on the realities and dangers of migration. Longido Waterhole and Longido Homestead, both included on this DVD, record Maasai viewers as they watch and discuss this film. Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City provides discussion material concerning increased exposure to HIV, and the attraction of migration as a means of survival in the face of encroaching poverty. Following a strategy of collaborative, applied visual anthropology, the filmmakers worked with university educated Maasai to document the day-to-day lives of three young Maasai brothers (ilmurran, "warriors"). The young men all live at the same homestead in central Tanzania. Using interviews and vérité footage, the film invites the brothers to discuss discrimination, homelessness, and disease in the cities. It also highlights how their different ages influence their attitudes toward traditional Maasai values. Before he became ill, the eldest advocated migration as an expression of independence and courage; the youngest sees no purpose in "wandering" and advocates farming, a means of subsistence rejected by most Maasai. Ilmurran illustrates how poverty and migration have reshaped Maasai identity.

Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City (Dir. Michael Crammond and Kellen Prandini, 22 min, 2010)

Excerpts from Changa Revisited (Dir. Peter Biella and Leonard Kamerling, 17 min, 2012)

Composed of selections from a feature-length documentary, Excerpts from Changa Revisited depicts the shocking clarity with which three Ilparakuyo Maasai women understand the dissolution of their Ilparakuyo community. They describe their homestead as torn by human and livestock diseases, widespread alcoholism among men, and the increase of poverty, disrespect, migration and violence. Changa Revisited was filmed in a community that is very close to Dar es Salaam: for that reason, the community is experiencing the full destructive impact of migration and access to city life. Changa Revisited is therefore a cautionary tale to other, more isolated, Maasai communities that are currently less impacted by the crises of migration and HIV depicted in the film. Another video contained in this DVD, Longido Homestead, records women in a relatively isolated Kisongo Maasai community who watch Changa Revisited and discuss the fate of their less fortunate Maasai sisters to the south. The story of Changa represents to them — and to others in very isolated Maasai communities — what the future may bring.

Longido Waterhole (Dir. Peter Biella and Leonard Kamerling, 8 min, 2010)

All of the films in the Maasai Migrants DVD explore a technique of applied anthropology in which films are used to trigger often passionate post-screening discussions among Maasai audiences. Longido Waterhole, like its companion, Longido Homestead, documents such a discussion. As the film opens, a dozen Kisongo Maasai men have just viewed Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City, one of the Series' trigger films about social change. The viewers, who live more than two hundred miles north of the community where the Ilmurran video was shot, launch into a discussion about the profound changes faced by their own community. They do not concern themselves with the principle theme of the Ilmurran film, i.e., the crisis of young Maasai migrating to the city. Instead, the film triggers a discussion of their own related crisis — the city migrating to them. Rapid regional development with new highways, foreign workers and permanent dwellings are all encroaching on their once isolated desert grazing land. Comments divide along age lines: senior warriors criticize their "fathers" for facilitating the arrival of outsiders and for their adherence to "outmoded" Maasai traditions. Elders reply that traditions are the only value that Maasai should preserve. The discussion at the Longido Waterhole gives insight into the ideological rifts concerning modernization among different age groups of Maasai. It also shows how using a film that focuses on one facet of modernization may trigger discussions of others that are more pertinent locally.

Longido Homestead (Dir. Peter Biella and Leonard Kamerling, 8 min, 2010)

Like its companion piece, Longido Waterhole and other videos on this DVD, Longido Homestead is part of the Maasai Migrants Series, a multi-year exploration of the use of applied anthropological media in facilitating social change through the screening and discussion of trigger films. Longido Homestead's women viewers are asked to discuss a video clip from Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City, and a segment of Changa Revisited (both contained on this DVD). Unlike their male counterparts recorded in Longido Waterhole, these women viewers stay focused on the themes of the films they viewed. Like the men, however, the women understand the film topic in ways that differ according to their age. Older women declare that traditional Maasai medicines are an effective cure of AIDS. Their daughters, adult women who have visited clinics and have some formal education, know differently. Longido Homestead shows how the screening of trigger films can create an unprecedented opportunity for open discussion between age grades, opportunities in which younger women may contradict and educate their elders. The film also reveals an important strategy in the use of trigger films among communities that are as thoroughly sex-segregated as the Maasai. The women are only able to speak frankly with one another when the filmmakers persuade their husbands to leave.

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Changa Revisited

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Changa Revisited
Buy Now: $320.00

Changa Revisited is the story of Tanzania Maasai elder Toreto ole Koisenge and his family, seen from two points in time across a thirty year divide. His life has drastically changed since anthropologist Peter Biella first visited his home thirty years ago. Then he had six hundred cattle. Now disease has reduced his herd to twenty. The world of Maasai pastoralists has gotten smaller and smaller since the Tanzania government forced them to live in permanent villages and end the seasonal cattle migrations. “The world is upside-down…what can you do except change?” says Toreto. The film draws on hundreds of photographs and audio recordings taken in 1980 by Peter Biella. These images, woven with contemporary video footage, create a deeply personal portrait of the unfolding of a family's life through three decades of tumultuous change.

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The Chairman and the Lions

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

The Chairman and the Lions
Buy Now: $320.00

As recently as forty years ago, most sections of the Maasai were semi-nomadic and relatively independent of the nation-state. However, political, social and economic changes in East Africa have forced many herders to adopt a sedentary lifestyle.

The Chairman and the Lions introduces Frank Kaipai Ikoyo, a charismatic Ilparakuyo Maasai who, at thirty-three, is the leader of a Tanzanian village called Lesoit. Ikoyo was elected to his post at the age of twenty-six in part because he had completed primary school. That someone so young would be accorded such authority would have been without precedent not long ago. Yet this ethnography of Ikoyo's duties as village chairman shows how literacy and insight into the workings of the nation-state are essential for Maasai to combat the many lions, both real and figurative, that beset them: land grabbers, "bush" lawyers, unemployment, out-migration and poverty.

Like leaders of many indigenous groups, Ikoyo understands education to be a double-edged sword. He advocates schooling as a key to village self-determination, while still seeking to preserve the foundations of pastoralist identity. For as one Maasai woman argues, schooling may well transform their children into "educated criminals."

The film depicts Ikoyo contending with the invasion of village land by a non-Maasai farmer, interrogating spies in a lawsuit, persuading mothers to send their daughters to school, navigating the legalese of an exploitative contract, and eliciting help from a renowned elder to train young warriors in the art of lion hunting. The Chairman and the Lions interweaves its observational vignettes of Ikoyo's activities with narrative accounts by the chairman himself.

SELECTED SCREENING HISTORY

Special Jury Award, Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), Tanzania, 2013
First Prize, ETNOFilm Festival for Ethnographic and Anthropological Film, Croatia, 2013
NAFA - Nordic Anthropological Film Association Festival, Iceland, 2014
Ethnografilm Festival, France, 2014
Gottingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, Germany, 2014
ETHNOCINECA, Austria, 2014
Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec (FIFEQ), Canada, 2014
Days of Ethnographic Film, Slovenia, 2014
11th World Film Festival, Estonia, 2014
The Archaeology Channel Int'l Film and Video Festival, USA, 2014
ETHNOFEST Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, Greece, 2013
Intimate Lens Ethnographic Film Festival, Italy, 2013
SIEF Congress, Tartu, Estonia, 2013
The Heart of Slavonia' International Ethno Film Festival, Djakovo, Croatia, 2012
SVA Ethnographic Film and Media Festival, San Francisco, USA, 2012
Jean Rouch International Film Festival, Paris, France, 2012
Meetings of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, England, 2012
Festival of Visual Anthropology ASPEKTY, Turon, Poland, 2012

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Undala & Undala Conversations

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 13:38:00 GMT

Undala & Undala Conversations
Buy Now: $295.00

Undala (color, 28 min, 1967)

Undala was filmed in 1964 in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan just before the emergence of the technology required for the field recording of synchronous sound. Dust hangs over the land, diffusing the light, muting shadow, and adding a patina of gold to each scene. As an intense and purely observational experience, it could be seen as a precursor to what is being referred to today as "sensory ethnography."

The village Gangwa is presented as first encountered by a team of filmmakers and anthropologists. A musical score by Harold Schram, a student of Indian classical music, accents the movement and rhythm of a medley of visual impressions of daily work activities: a potter opens a flawless clay vessel on his potter's wheel spinning on a spike of wood, a carpenter planes a sliver from a plank held without tool or vise and men lift 340 pounds of water from a shaft well in the skin of a flayed bovine. The tactility of grit and dust, of sweat and heat, of abrasive winds and squinting eyes, and of water flushing from a leather bag, infuses the viewing with the sensate — an embodied world of the craftsmen that no longer exists.

The Selection Board of the IX Festival dei Popoli awarded Undala special mention: “For the accuracy with which significant aspects of everyday work in a third world country are revealed and for the quality of the image.” (March 4, 1968, Florence). The film received the Cine Golden Eagle, with screenings at the Brussels Film Festival and the International Festival of Short Films, Krakow, Poland, in 1968.

Undala Conversations (color, 30 min, 2011, 16:9)

In 2009, the ethnographer Thomas Rosin, who studied Gangwa across a span of forty years, and the producer Allison Jablonko meet to discuss the early work. In Undala Conversations, they watch the original film and explore its evidence of a feudal architecture and settlement plan, the virtuosity of craft production, and the causes of the single example of ineptitude filmed among working men. They review how the first impressions of fluid movement, concealed faces, and the deft coordination of craftsmen, captured by Undala's cinematographer, Marek Jablonko, led to puzzles and questions, opening numerous avenues to research that the anthropologist pursued in subsequent years.

A discussion of farming practices reveals a sophisticated regime involving partnerships in irrigated farming, rainwater harvesting and aquifer recharge coordinated with husbandry that made the Thar of Rajasthan one of the most densely populated deserts in the world.

"Suitable for college courses in cultural anthropology, economic anthropology, ethnographic film, and Indian/South Asian studies, as well as general audiences." -- Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

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