Documentary Educational Resources - Geography / Asia / Indonesia / All Films

Wawan's Prayer

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 10:39:30 GMT

Wawan is an autistic boy from Banjarmasin, Indonesia. Struggling to meet his needs at home, his parents make the difficult decision to send him to a brand new school on another island to receive specialized education and therapeutic support. Together Wawan and his teacher, Yasin, learn how to build an inclusive community for youth on the spectrum that accommodates their differences and celebrates their abilities. As the school grows, Wawan matures into a young man respected for his skill in prayer recitation.

This film is sold as a part of a set which also includes All God's Children.

Selected Screenings & Awards

Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, Toronto, 2023

German Int'l Ethnographic Film Festival, Göttingen, Germany, 2022

SEAxSEA: Southeast Asia x Seattle Film & Literature Festival, Seattle, USA 2022

Quarter Finalist, Reel-Abilities Film Festival: New York, New York, USA 2022

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All God's Children

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 10:39:29 GMT

All God's Children
Buy Now: $460.00

Well over half a million children in Indonesia are on the autism spectrum and have varying difficulty with social interaction and communication, as well as uneven access to resources, education and services. “All God’s Children” tells the story of Idris, a nonverbal autistic teenager living in rural Central Java. Idris’s mother, Isti, struggles to understand Idris and meet their basic needs, especially since the two moved away from Idris’s neurotypical twin brother and biological father over thirteen years ago. Shot over the course of five years, the film follows Idris and Isti to traditional healers, biomedical treatment centers, specialized schools, activist organizations, and community gatherings as they seek the acceptance and support they long for. As the family ultimately finds new avenues to healing and hope, the film also tells a story of how grassroots disability awareness movements, local cultural models of inclusion, and religious principles can unite to better support all members of a community.

This film is sold as a part of a set which also includes Wawan's Prayer.

“All God's Children promotes an awareness of grassroots disability in Indonesia. The film itself has a lot of heart. It’s very empathetic and kind to its interlocutors. We also want to recognize the film for its exceptional technical achievements. Its editing, it’s really truly exceptionally edited. And the long term ethnographic research that went into making it, which is evident in the final outcome. The film is a wonderful example of ethnographic storytelling.” – RAI Film Festival, Werbner Award committee

Selected Screenings & Awards

Commendation – Werbner Award, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival, USA, 2023

Best Ethnographic Film, New York International Film Awards, New York, 2021

Finalist - Best Documentary Film, 4th Dimension Independent Film Festival, Bali, Indonesia, 2021

Golden Door International Film Festival, New Jersey, 2022
Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, Vancouver, BC, 2019

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Death of the One who Knows

Mon, 9 May 2022 15:10:55 GMT

Death of the One who Knows
Buy Now: $320.00

In the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi (Indonesia), Lumbaa is one of the last masters of ritual speech. After his forced conversion to Pentecostalism, he is compelled to stop all his ritual activity and oratory. Concerned by the disappearance of “those who know”, a young Catholic priest named Yans Sulo sets out in search of the society’s ancient oral genres, seeking to invent new forms that would keep them alive. The two men meet. But it is too late. By recounting the life and death of Lumbaa, the film shows how the intrusion of world religion disrupts a Southeast Asian society.

"This documentary concerns the struggle to keep Aluk Todolo and its rituals alive in the face of government efforts at erasure. There is a beauty, order and moral sophistication to Lumbaa. He gently draws our attention to painful tensions between morality, tradition, religion and daily village life. Rappoport locates his story within a narrative concerning Christianity, colonialism, globalisation and disruption... Rappoport's film documents important and threatened customary knowledge in her focus on this ritual leader and his prowess. Ethnomusicology and documentary cinema are powerful tools in understanding the complex way in which ritual change is a corollary to socio-political contestation. Its brilliance is haunting." – Tanisha Jowsey, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

Selected Screenings & Awards

Honorable Mention, Best Documentary, International Council for Traditional Music, 2022

Honourable Mention, Werbner Award for Visual Anthropology, RAI Film Festival, 2021

AAS 2022 Film Expo, USA, 2022

Riga Pasaules Film Festival, 2021

Bayonne Film Festival Haizebegi, 2021

Maison de l'Asie (EFEO), 2021

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Tajen

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 13:30:00 GMT

Tajen
Buy Now: $295.00

Shot in the arid landscape of West Bali, Indonesia, Tajen, Balinese for cockfight, follows multiple narrative threads of this ancient spectacle--that of the blade, the rooster, the cockfighter. It is the moment when these elements come together during the bloody match that the real drama begins.

With a richly sensory approach that embeds the viewer within the action of the arena, Tajen is a poetic visual evocation of the intimacy, brutality, and festivity of the fight. While neither approving nor decrying this tradition, the film immerses the viewer into the visual and auditory domains of steel, feathers, blood and the money that defines Tajen.

The film, and its companion website Tajen: Interactive were conceptualized as a visual ethnography to complement Clifford Geertz's seminal piece, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" and bring the study of the fight into the 21st century.

SELECTED SCREENINGS

Society for Visual Anthropology, 2016

International Ethnographic Film Festival (Belgrade), 2016

Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, 2019

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40 Years of Silence

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:18:00 GMT

40 Years of Silence
Buy Now: $320.00

40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy tells the story of one of the largest unknown mass-killings of the 20th century. In 1965-66, an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 people were secretly killed when General Suharto began a bloody purge of suspected communists throughout Indonesia. For decades, the Indonesian government repressed all memory of this event, and the world looked away.

Based on the research of prominent anthropologist Robert Lemelson and edited by two-time Academy Award winner Pietro Scalia, this film follows the compelling testimonies of four individuals and their families from Central Java and Bali, as they break their silence for the first time. Told in understated detail, the cumulative effect of their stories is heartbreaking, profound and ultimately redemptive.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Winner, Best Asian Documentary, Endeavors Documentary Film Festival, Singapore, 2013

Nominee, Best Editing in a Documentary Film, St. Tropez International Film Festival, Nice, France, 2013

Winner, Award of Excellence, Canada International Film Awards, 2013

Winner, Best Foreign Feature, Oregon Film Awards, 2012

Winner, Award of Excellence, International Film Festival for Peace, Inspiration & Equality, Indonesia, 2012

Nominee, Most Innovative Production, History Makers Awards, 2011

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Afflictions Series

Wed, 5 Sep 2018 11:07:00 GMT

Afflictions Series
Buy Now: $1,395.00

Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia is a six-part series of ethnographic films on severe mental illness in Indonesia, based on material drawn from 12 years of person-centered research by writer/anthropologist Robert Lemelson. The series, which follows six individuals of different ages and backgrounds, explores the relationship between culture, mental illness, and first-person experience.

The films may be purchased individually, as a complete series, or in two sets organized by theme:

Volume 1: Psychotic Disorders

Shadows & Illuminations (35 min, 2010) explores how non-normative mental events and behavior can be understood or interpreted in multiple ways outside the confines of Western psychiatric diagnostics.

Memory of My Face (22 min, 2011) illustrates how the residues of colonialism and the pervasive influence of globalization affect the subjective experience of mental illness.

Ritual Burdens (25 min, 2011) questions how communal spiritual obligations may be folded into personal schemas of stress to trigger episodes of mental illness.

Volume 2: Neuropsychiatric Disorders

The Bird Dancer (40 min, 2010) focuses on the social stigma of neuropsychiatric disorder and the human suffering it entails.

Family Victim (38 min, 2010) examines bi-directional influences between an individual considered to have a disruptive or troublesome personality.

Kites and Monsters (22 min, 2011) follows a young Balinese from boyhood to manhood, discovering the influential and protective aspects of culture that may guide developmental neuropsychiatric processes.

Films in the Afflictions series
The Bird Dancer
Family Victim
Kites and Monsters
Memory of My Face
Ritual Burdens

Shadows & Illuminations

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The Jero Tapakan series

Wed, 5 Sep 2018 11:07:00 GMT

The Jero Tapakan series
Buy Now: $795.00

Jero Tapakan, a spirit medium in a small, central Balinese village, consults with a group of clients in her shrinehouse. An introduction precedes the main seance, providing a visual impression of a seance and background information on the medium and her profession. The clients wish to contact the spirit of their dead son to discover the cause of his death and his wishes for his cremation ceremony. Jero is possessed several times in the course of the seance: first by a protective houseyard deity who demands propitiary offerings that had previously been overlooked; then by the spirit of the petitioner's deceased father, who requests further offerings to ease his path to the other world; and finally by the spirit of the son. In an emotional scene the son's spirit reveals the cause of his premature death (sorcery) and instructions for his forthcoming cremation. Between each possession the medium converses with her clients, clarifying vague points in the often ambiguous trance speech.

Films in the Jero Tapakan series:

A Balinese Trance Seance

Jero on Jero: A Balinese Trance Seance Observed
The Medium is the Masseuse: A Balinese Massage w/Jero Tapakan
Releasing the Spirits: A Village Cremation in Bali

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A Celebration of Origins

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:15:00 GMT

A Celebration of Origins
Buy Now: $320.00

The people of the Tana 'Ai region of Flores, Indonesia live in seven ceremonial domains, of which Wai Brama is the largest and the oldest. The people of Wai Brama are shifting cultivators, hunters and gatherers who, unlike their neighbors, have maintained their traditional ceremonial and social system.

A Celebration of Origins, filmed in 1980, depicts the first celebration of these rituals since 1960. The rituals, which require the participation of the entire community, had been delayed by poor harvests and epidemics. The film focuses on a small group of ritual leaders who struggle to hold the celebration in the absence of the Source of the Domain, the ritual leader of the community, who died after initiating the rituals. Evoking the contested nature of ritual, the film demonstrates how ritual performance implicates delicate political relationships based on pragmatic alliances, festering antipathies or developing jealousies.

Conflict is the thread that weaves together the disparate themes of the film. It is a finely crafted, sensually striking film with a compelling story that focuses on one of the central themes in contemporary anthropological debate: the contested nature of social - and ritual - life.

This film complements E. Douglas Lewis' published work on Tana 'Ai, including People of the Source: The Social and Ceremonial Order of Tana Wai Brama on Flores, in addition to the films Timothy and Patsy Asch made in collaboration with anthropologists James J. Fox and Linda Connor on the islands of Roti and Bali.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS
Society For Visual Anthropology commendation 1993
Award for Excellence, Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Video Festival, 1993
34th Festival dei Popoli, Florence, Italy, 1993
1st Prize, Bilan du Film Ethnographique, Paris, 1994
Margaret Mead Film Festival, New York, California 1993, 1994

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Dani Films

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Dani Films
Buy Now: $500.00

Digitally Remastered 2-DVD Set

This special edition 2-disc DVD set includes:

• Dani Sweet Potatoes & Dani Houses digitally remastered

• commentary on both films by Karl Heider

• a narrated pictorial history (9 min) of Heider's career in archaeology and anthropology

In 1963, under the auspices of the EDC curriculum project Man: A Course of Study, an elementary social studies curriculum, Karl Heider returned to the central highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). Heider had spent the previous two years in the Grand Baliem Valley with Robert Gardner's Harvard-Peabody exhibition, and his intention was to return from this second trip with material to be used to teach American grade school students about digging-stick horticulture and house construction. However, after producing the Netsilik series, the EDC curriculum project fell victim to the political climate of the time. Heider spent the following years presenting Hubula (known as Dani* outside of the community) material himself, eventually producing the ethnographic classics, Dani Sweet Potatoes and Dani Houses.

About the films:

Dani Sweet Potatoes (19 min) A study of the sophisticated process of sweet potato horticulture developed by the Hubula. The film follows the Hubula sweet potato cycle from clearing off the old brush and weeds from a fallow field to planting, harvesting, cooking, and eating. At that time the Hubula had the simplest of tools - long pointed wooden poles used as digging sticks that are hardened in the fire and soaked in water - and they still used their stone-bladed adzes. (By now, most Hubula use steel shovels, axes, and bush knives and make stone adzes only for the tourist trade.)

Even though their tools are simple, their field system is intensive and sophisticated, with an intricate system of ditches. Perhaps the ditches were originally necessary to drain swampy land, but they now serves as both drainage and irrigation ditches, depending on whether rainfall is too little or too much. The ditches also hold compost. Weeds and topsoil collect there, later to be smeared back onto the garden beds. Pigs are part of the ecological system, plowing up the soil in search of food and fertilizing it with their droppings. In this film, we see people from a single neighborhood working alone in their own garden plots or, at times joining together in a cooperative work party.

Dani Houses (16 min) The film observes both round and square house construction techniques of the Hubula. It shows how the ground is cleared, walls are made from boards, poles lashed together, and roofs being thatched. Though it follows the house-building process from beginning to end, one is left asking the question: What happened after the houses were built?

*Note on term “Dani”

The preferred name for the community in these films is Hubula. The name "Dani" as used in these films is an exonym used by Moni, a neighboring group of people living west of the Baliem Valley. The name has been reproduced in many colonial and postcolonial texts, even until today.

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Dead Birds

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Dead Birds
Buy Now: $34.95

Robert Gardner's seminal 1964 film Dead Birds is a portrait of the lives, beliefs, practices and ritual warfare of the Hubula people of the remote Baliem Valley in western New Guinea, now part of Indonesia. In 1963 Dead Birds won the prestigious Robert Flaherty Award and in 1998 was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Dead Birds is considered a pivotal work in the history of the discipline of visual anthropology and continues to be used frequently in university lectures and seminars to engage students in wider questions and debates.

Filmmaker Robert Gardner, in describing the experience making the film, comments, “Dead Birds is a film about the Dani*, a people dwelling in the Grand Valley of the Baliem high in the mountains of West Irian. When I shot the film in 1961, the Dani had an almost classic Neolithic culture. They were exceptional in the way they focussed their energies and based their values on an elaborate system of intertribal warfare and revenge. Neighboring groups of Dani clans, separated by uncultivated strips of no man's land, engaged in frequent formal battles.

When a warrior was killed in battle or died from a wound and even when a woman or a child lost their life in an enemy raid, the victors celebrated and the victims mourned. Because each death had to be avenged, the balance was continually being adjusted with the spirits of the aggrieved lifted and the ghosts of slain comrades satisfied as soon as a compensating enemy life was taken. There was no thought in the Dani world of wars ever ending, unless it rained or became dark. Without war there would be no way to satisfy the ghosts. Wars were also the best way they knew to keep a terrible harmony in a life which would be, without the strife they invented, mostly hard and dull.

Dead Birds has a meaning which is both immediate and allegorical. In the Dani language it refers to the weapons and ornaments recovered in battle. Its other more poetic meaning comes from the Dani belief that people, because they are like birds, must die. In making Dead Birds certain kinds of behavior were followed, never directed. It was an attempt to see people from within and to wonder, when the selected fragments of that life were assembled, if they might speak not only of the Dani but also of ourselves.”

Digitally Remastered 2-DVD Set

The special edition 2-disc DVD of Dead Birds includes the remastered film and the following extra features:

6 sequences of edited scenes cut from the first answer print of Dead Birds with original narration and a commentary by Robert Gardner and Lucien Taylor
An audio track of commentary by Robert Gardner and Ross McElwee
A French language track narrated by Jean Rouch
A gallery of photographs shot during the making of Dead Birds and accompanied by excerpts read by Robert Gardner from his field journals
An excerpt from a television interview featuring a conversation about Dead Birds between Octavio Paz, William Alfred and Robert Gardner
2 sequences from a black and white print of Dead Birds made at the timeof the film 's release. These are accompanied by a conversation byRobert Gardner and Lucien Taylor
Previously unreleased outtakes from the archive of footage shot for Dead Birds

“A cinematographic interpretation of the life of a group of Grand Valley Dani, who are mountain Papuans in West New Guinea (Irian Barat, Indonesia), studied by the Harvard-Peabody Expedition (1961-1963). This film was made by Gardner in 1961, before the area was pacified by the Dutch government. The film focuses on Weyak, the farmer and warrior, and on Pua, the young swineherd, following them through the events of Dani life: sweet potato horticulture, pig keeping, salt winning, battles, raids and ceremonies.” —Karl G. Heider

*Note on term “Dani”

The preferred name for the community in this film is Hubula. The name "Dani" as used in this film is an exonym used by Moni, a neighboring group of people living west of the Baliem Valley. The name has been reproduced in many colonial and postcolonial texts, even until today.

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