Documentary Educational Resources - Geography / Africa / Tanzania / 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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Fishers of Dar

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Fishers of Dar
Buy Now: $295.00

Samaki wa Dar es Salaam/Fishers of Dar is an ethnographic film about the fishermen and women of downtown Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It explores the continuity and integrity of traditional fishing practices in new, contemporary settings. Dar es Salaam is a metropolis of 3 million people yet the city's demand for fish is entirely met by equipment, methods and tools that have been used here for hundreds of years.

This film takes the viewer to the central fish market and pier in the city harbor, and to a small fishing community away from the market. It is structured between two sunrises and two sunsets: the story begins before dawn, with small lanteen sailed boats (ngawaalas) and bigger mashua boats (a diesel engine replacing the sail) leaving for fishing grounds close by or further out to sea, and continues with fishing at sea; coming back to unload and sell fish at the market; auctions and retail sales; fast food preparation and sale at the market; home-based work and leisure activities in the fishing community.

Eschewing commentary and voice-over explanation — similar to Forest of Bliss — the film shows the many hands the fish pass through before reaching customers. Hundreds of people make a living in the process. We see fishermen and women, boat builders, boat crews, auctioneers, laborers, vendors and market people of all kinds. Not the least are women who come with buckets, buy and clean small fish and then go back home by bus to sell fried fish in the hundreds of smaller markets of the city.

The film reveals how traditional methods articulate with modern demands. There are problems: a brief text at the end of the film points out that the market was recently demolished to make way for expansion of the harbor. The age old process continues but under difficult new conditions.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Best Documentary, Athens Ohio Film Festival, 2003

Juror's Choice, Black Maria Film Festival, 2003

Golden Dhow, Director's Choice, Zanzibar Int'l Film Festival, 2002

Best Cinematography, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2002

Northwest Folk Life Film Festival, Seattle, 2003

Rakumi Arts Film Festival, Seattle Museum of Art, 2003

Rhode Island Int'l Film Festival, Providence, 2003

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Five Species

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Five Species
Buy Now: $320.00

Three species of monkeys and two apes living in their natural habitat in Africa are compared in this video. The monkeys include the veret, the blue monkey and the black and white colobus, while the apes are common chimpanzees and eastern lowland gorillas. This footage, shot by a primatologist, includes nuances of behavior and social interaction which are not usually included in more commercial productions. Many sequences are long enough to allow the observer to watch behavior unfold between animals and learn what kinds of details to look for in live observation. The same types of behavior are recorded for each species (as much as possible) to permit comparisons to be drawn between diet and foraging patterns, infant care, locomotion and predator defense mechanisms. The videos are intended to allow the audience to see the same types of behavior by different species in different habitats and to draw the comparisons themselves. This format provides a condensed view of the life of several species thus emphasizing the variability and the adaptive nature of primates rather than focusing on the details of one form. This is a useful teaching device. The particular areas of interest in this video are the inclusion of the rarely filmed blue monkey, black and white colobus and eastern lowland gorilla, as well as the division of a monkey carcass by the chimpanzees and the interactions between humans and blue monkeys in a park in Nairobi.

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The Mseyas

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:50:00 GMT

The Mseyas
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The Mseyas are Alberina, Maria, Amos and Orselina. A family of four siblings in Tanzania, they have been orphaned by AIDS like so many other young people in Africa. Their lives are a daily struggle to survive without parental or state support. Earning a small income by collecting firewood, the Mseyas contend with illness, debt and constant worry. However, they maintain a certain youthful optimism about the future.

"Such a hard life," says Alberina, "has taught us how to live." She and Maria - the two slightly older sisters - work and cook to make sure that their younger brother and sister can attend school, saying, "children have a right to an education," though not very old herself.

An intense commitment to one another and their religious faith give the Mseyas a desire to keep going forward. Spanish director Gustavo Vizoso was moved to document their situation, capturing the light and color of Tanzania in beautifully observed photography, in order to speak out on behalf of the 12 million AIDS orphans living in Africa today.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival, Qatar, 2009

1001 Documentary Film Festival, Istambul, Turkey, 2008

Document 6 Int'l Human Rights Documentary Film Festival,Scotland, 2008

Documenta Madrid film festival, Spain, 2008

Crossroads of Europe International Film Festival, Lulin, Poland, 2008

DOCSDF - International Documentary Film Festival, Mexico, 2008

Extremadura Documentary Film Festival, Portugal, 2007

L'Alternativa Independent Film Festival, Barcelona, 2007

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The Swahili Beat

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:47:00 GMT

The Swahili Beat
Buy Now: $295.00

The Swahili Beat is an upbeat look at the remarkable history of the Swahili people of Kenya and Tanzania's East African coast. Packed with the music and dance of its indigenous peoples, the film takes viewers along the coast from the fabled island of Lamu to Zanzibar, Mombasa, Kilwa, Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam, tracing the development of the Swahili culture through the intermarriage of Arab settlers, arriving from Oman in the 8th century, with local Africans. The resulting Islamic hybrid culture cemented economic and social stability.

The emergence of the Swahili as prosperous merchant brokers in the Indian Ocean basin and in the growing East African slave trade made them a lucrative target for successive waves of settlers, invaders and colonizers, including the Persians, Portuguese, Arabs, Germans, and British. Though the strength of Swahili culture has prevailed through much of this invasion and colonization, communities now face new threats in the face globalization, the internet, and tourism.

This DVD also includes:

Swahili History (11 minutes)

A ground-breaking interview with archaeologist Dr. Stephanie Wynn-Jones, on new perspectives in the study of Swahili history.

Dreadlox (3 minutes)

Alu Mohammed, a resident of Lamu, illustrates the effects of the personal loss of culture and belief system.

The Swahili Beat is an ideal tool for social studies teachers in grades 6-12 as well as for first-year college teachers in any African Studies program. Punctuated with plenty of Swahili music and dance, the film is easy to watch, its colorful visual elements seamlessly covering the history of the Swahili coast while offering viewers a new and dynamic perspective on this area that is well known as a travel destination for American and European tourists, but whose history is seldom revealed. The film is immensely appealing to younger viewers who relate to the music, particularly to the upbeat drumming and the more contemporary Swahili Rap that is heard toward the end of the film. In addition, the film's half-hour length makes it easily incorporated into any classroom curriculum.

The Swahili Beat raises many issues and questions on African history and Swahili history, and incorporates an understanding of general themes in social studies that are required in standard Social Studies Curricula, as follows: Belief Systems; Change; Conflict; Choice; Culture; Diversity; Empathy; Identity; Interdependence; Imperialism; Movement of People and Goods; Nationalism; Urbanization.

AFRICAN STUDIES: THE SWAHILI COAST

1) Historical perceptions of East African coastal culture and how these have changed over time

2) The development of Swahili culture as an Afro-Arab hybrid

3) The cultural connections between the Swahili and other Islamic peoples of Africa and the Middle East

4) The development of trade between the Swahili, the African interior and the Indian Ocean Basin

5) Swahili literature and poetry as a source for interpreting historic events 6) The significance of the Swahili coast to European explorers

7) The effect of various invasions on the culture and language of the Swahili people

8) The East African slave trade as compared to the West African slave trade 9) The significance of the Swahili Coast to international Colonial enterprise 10) The factors leading to the current economic marginalization of the Swahili coast

SOCIAL STUDIES: MAJOR THEMES

1) How do historians organize Time and Information? What are some alternative ways of viewing History and Time?

2) The use of primary and secondary sources in the interpretation of history

3) The use of maps to locate an area geographically and to explore the themes listed below

4) What aspects of a culture attract international trade?

5) How does international trade promote prosperity, communication, and culture?

6) What factors lead to settlement in specific areas?

7) What are the differences between urban and rural settlements?

8) What diverse forces work together to raise any specific culture above others? (technology; immigrants; trade; migration)

9) How can a language reflect the history of a people?

10) What factors lead to the formation of a community or national identity? 11) How does globalization effect indigenous cultures?

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The Tree of Iron

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

The Tree of Iron
Buy Now: $320.00

Tree of Iron is one of the few films to document archaeological work on ancient civilizations in Africa. The film details the history and processes of African iron smelting and presents convincing evidence for early, complex indigenous technologies.

Tree of Iron is set in Tanzania, East Africa, on the western shores of Lake Victoria, where Haya people have lived for centuries. The film follows the work of Peter Schmidt, an archaeologist and historian who studies the ancient, 2000-year-old iron industrial sites of the region, as well as extensive oral traditions that illustrate the role of iron in agriculture, political power, and mythology.

The tree in the film's title refers to an enormous tree of great antiquity that is the symbolic center of Haya iron production. Linked to rich iron symbolism, a vibrant mythology, and to ancient iron forges and furnaces, the site of this iron tree produced the first evidence for ancient, sophisticated metalworking technology.

Schmidt works with African iron smelters who build and operate reconstructed versions of traditional furnaces to demonstrate the technological principles that ancient workers used to produce high carbon steel. It also illustrates the degradation of the environment caused by this ancient industry. The film's experimental and comparative approach takes the viewer through each of the technical steps involved in smelting, from charcoal production to furnace construction.

The 80 to 90-year-old Haya smelters are the primary actors in this remarkable process. Tree of Iron combines foci on archaeology, ethnography, and metallurgy to overturn faulty ideas about the history of technology in Africa and replace them with an emphasis on wonder and achievement.

"This important film deserves a wide audience...it is one of the very few films to document archaeological work in sub-Saharan Africa and the only one to examine ethnoarchaeological research and experimentation there.

Peter Schmidt has combined the talents of archaeologist, ethnologist and metallurgist in his quest to understand early African iron smelting. This entire project is an exemplary model of interdisciplinary archaeology, and we are fortunate not just to have a record of it on film, but to have a record of such high quality."
— Peter Allen, ARCHAEOLOGY

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