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Funeral Season

Funeral Season MAIN

Funeral Season

Price: $320.00
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Filmmaker Name: Matthew Lancit
Film Length: 87 min
Film Year: 2011
Duration: 76-90 min
Decade: 2010s
Color: color
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ABOUT

“We pray to our ancestors but we do not worship them. You, you need an intermediary, the priest. But for us, our intermediary is the ancestor who is sitting next to God,” says Poundé, the old Cameroonian ethnologist, to the young Jewish director from Canada. And with this conclusive statement, everything becomes clear: the funerals in memory of “the dead who are not dead” organized several days or even years following the burial, the chants, brass bands and traditional dancers who accompany and punctuate the village rituals. The ancestral rites struggle to survive in a continuously westernized society of consumption by parading wealth and excess for all to see — even the dead. Funeral Season takes the viewer through the red dust of Cameroon's laterite slopes and into the heart of the Bamileke country, where one funeral flows into the next. These death celebrations provide an opportunity to see elaborate costumes and masks, festive songs and dances, and lavish feasts, while illuminating the communal links which bind the Bamileke as an ethnic group and society. Along the way, the director befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors. At times, the dialogues alienate him from the locals; at other times they bring the two closer together. Like the dead and the living, they belong to two different worlds often mirroring each other. There is a lightness to be found in this subjective ethnographic film which imaginatively and symbolically turns the gazes of two different worlds upon each other.

CREDITS & INFO

Funeral Season 

Written, Produced and Directed by 
Matthew Lancit

Producer and Director of Photography
Laura Hudock

Edited by 
Julie Faucher and 
Matthew Lancit

Sound by 
Daniel Owen

Original Music by 
Dmitri Slepovitch

Other Songs by 
Bu‘K’ru 
Black Jah

Additional Photography by 
Matthew Lancit

Translation and Subtitles 
Blandine Barlet

With The Participation of
Léon and Yolande Neol
André and Nicole Tchassi
Madame Reginca and Gervais Djimeki Lekpa
Dr. Nanfack Fotsop Roger
Professor René Poundé
Black Jah
Brain Tsopacha N’keng
Fon Narcasius III
Blandine Barlet

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