At the onset of the space race in the 1960s, the U.S. government feared its educational system was slipping behind that of the Soviet Union's. A controversial science initiative,
Man: A Course of Study, grew out of this response with the ambitious goal to teach American children what it meant to be human.
At the program's core was a benchmark of visual anthropology, the Netsilik Eskimo series, which captures a year in the life of a small Inuit community on the cusp of contact. Ultimately, Man: A Course of Study created a clash of values that rippled throughout the schools of America and revealed the fragile relationship between politics and educational reform.
Weaving together remarkable archival and contemporary footage, Through These Eyes revisits the politics and controversy of this unprecedented era in American educational reform and offers an historical perspective on the study of anthropology.
SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS
RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, London, 2005
American Psychological Association Annual Convention, Washington DC, 2005
Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival, Washington DC, 2005
Gottingen International Film Festival, Germany, 2006
Days of Ethnographic Film, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2008
EASA Film, Video & New Media Festival, Slovenia, 2008