Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Lemelson, Robert / 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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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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Family Victim

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:52:00 GMT

Family Victim
Buy Now: $295.00

Family Victim explores how families manage a troubled and troublesome member.

Estu Wardhani is a young Javanese man and has struggled for most of his life to achieve a sense of competency and inclusion in his familial and social world. The second youngest of eight children born to an upper-class family living in the rural region of Gunung Kidul in Cental Java, Estu has been 'different' ever since he was a young boy. Estu's actions, and their disorienting power, cannot be understood outside of the cultural and social context within which they have taken shape nor can they be considered apart from the disruptive and painful effects they have on his family.

Estu's problems are interpreted as 'psychopathy' by a psychiatrist, spirit possession by local healers, and as dimangakan or 'spoiled' by his family. Estu himself desires to be a 'big man', and he feels misunderstood and disrespected by his family. His case involves not only his own troubling symptoms, but the striking and extensive interpretive work his family, healers and community engages in while trying to understand Estu's personality and behavior.

This film explores the multiple ways the family interprets such dilemmas, and his tribulations and finally transformations as he matures into culturally defined adulthood.

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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Kites and Monsters

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:13:00 GMT

Kites and Monsters
Buy Now: $275.00

Kites and Monsters is part of the Afflictions: Culture & Mental Illness in Indonesia series of ethnographic films on severe mental illness in Indonesia, based on material drawn from 12 years of person-centered research by director and anthropologist Robert Lemelson.

The film focuses on a growing boy, Wayan Yoga, and is not so much about illness as it is an exploration of the protective aspects of culture that may guide developmental neuropsychiatric processes. At six years old, Wayan Yoga is an energetic boy who flies kites and is obsessed with the monsters of Balinese mythology. He also has various tics, which move his parents to seek treatment. At twenty, he is a young man planning his career as a chef and an expressive Balinese dancer. Ultimately, Wayan Yoga's tics are insignificant to his evolving sense of self-compared to the saturation of symbols, images, and narratives of his culture.

While Wayan must learn to negotiate the kinds of movements, interests, and goals that are culturally appropriate, the protective buffer of his family guides him successfully into normative Balinese adulthood.

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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Jathilan

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

Jathilan
Buy Now: $295.00

Practiced in Java for centuries, Jathilan is a folk dance that uses the power of music and dance to channel powerful and sometimes terrifying forces. Led by a spiritual guide and a whip-bearing ringleader, a group of dancers ride woven horses in rhythmic unison until they are entered by spirits. Once possessed they engage in a range of self-mortification behaviors until safely emerging from their altered state, left with no memory of the event and no lingering ill effects.

The film combines footage of a number of Jathilan performances with interviews with dancers, spiritual leaders, anthropologists, and enthusiasts. This extraordinary practice becomes more than just spectacle as Jathilan is contextualized within broader processes of Indonesian historical, political and social change and the viewer is provided a window into the subjective experiences of those who participate. Multiple interpretations of Jathilan's significance ultimately emerge, from an empirical proof of spiritual presence, to a strategy of community building, to a resistant expression of folk identity.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Sunscreen Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2013

SVA Ethnographic Film Festival 2012, USA, 2012

Pärnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival, Estonia, 2012

Days of Ethnographic Cinema, Russia, 2012

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Memory of My Face

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:49:00 GMT

Memory of My Face
Buy Now: $295.00

Memory of My Face is part of the Afflictions: Culture & Mental Illness in Indonesia series of ethnographic films on severe mental illness in Indonesia, based on material drawn from 12 years of person-centered research by director and anthropologist Robert Lemelson.

The film focuses on Bambang Rudjito, a university-educated Indonesian man in his late thirties diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It explores the "globalized" features of Bambang's illness and recovery narrative — western psychiatric diagnostics and pharmaceuticals, work opportunities in a rapidly changing urban environment, participation in an interfaith religious community, and his family's understanding and acceptance of what Bambang describes as a "mental disability." But it also considers aspects of Bambang's more complex, historically and politically shaded narrative, giving language and a deeper substance to his illness experience.

Memory of My Face illustrates how the residues of colonialism and the pervasive influence of globalization affect the subjective experience of mental illness.

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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Ngaben

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:11:00 GMT

Ngaben
Buy Now: $275.00

The Balinese cremation ceremony, or ngaben, has primarily been known in the West as either a major tourist attraction that dazzles visitors with the splendor, intricacy, and drama of its performance, or as fodder for long-standing anthropological arguments about personhood and emotion on the island that debated whether or not Balinese people expressed, or even experienced, grief.

According to Balinese Hindu beliefs, cremation is one of the most important steps in a person's spiritual life, and a heavy responsibility to the family, because it is through cremation that the physical body is returned to its five constituent elements and the soul is cleansed and released from the body to ascend to heaven and be reincarnated.

Ngaben: Emotion and Restraint in a Balinese Heart takes an impressionistic look at the ngaben from the perspective of a mourning son, Nyoman Asub, and reveals the intimacy, sadness, and tenderness at the core of this funerary ritual and the feeling and force that underlie an exquisite cultural tradition. Amidst ample cultural and interpretive understandings of the cremation ceremony, the film purposefully provides a personalistic, impressionistic, and poetic glimpse of the process and the complex emotions involved.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Honorable Mention, International Film Festival for Environment, Health and Culture, Indonesia, 2013

Ethnografilm Festival, France, 2014

Espiello International Ethnographic Documentary Festival, Spain, 2014

ETHNOCINECA, Austria, 2014

Sarasota Film Festival, Sarasota, Florida, 2013

Russian Anthropological Film Festival, Ekaterinburg, Russia, 2013

XXII International Film Festival of Ethnological Film, Belgrade, 2013

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