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World Film & Video in Northwest
Portland State University
The Marvelous Margaret Mead Traveling
Film and Video Festival
The Margaret Mead Traveling Film and Video Festival
offers unique glimpses into the lives of other peoples and cultures. All of the films
presented in this series are selected from the annual festival of new cultural documentaries
from around the world by the Margaret Mead Traveling Film and Video Festival programmers of the American Museum of Natural History.
from Why Pay Two Rents by Remy Weber
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Well becoming a favorite annual event of the West Coast for world
film and video fans, film professor, Brooke Jacobson, Ph.D. happily announced the
annual Margaret Mead Traveling Film and Video Festival will come to Portland State
University on May 4, 11.and 18. The series of three programs will be presented Saturday
evenings at 7:00 in Room 53 of Cramer Hall (located at Broadway and Mill), free and
open to the public. The festival each year showcases new independent cultural documentary
films from around the world. The three programs to be shown at Portland State University
include works from Mexico, the former Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Australia and the U.S.
dealing with issues of cultural identity, mixed heritage, resistance, personal relationships,
political repression and poetry.
Tom Biolsi, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Portland State University will
introduce the opening night screening of a film on the famed anthropologist Margaret
Mead, for whom the festival is named. The film Margaret Mead: A Portrait by a Friend
was produced in 1977, while Mead was still active at the American Museum of Natural
History during the final months of her life. John Rouch, the outstanding French documentarist
is assisted by ethnographer John Marshall as sound recordist in capturing Mead's
reflections on her life and the work that drew her from her Greenwich Village home
to Samoa.
Other films to be shown opening night include Islands, a sensuous exploration by
the filmmaker, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, child of a German father and a Samoan mother,
of his status as both an insider and outsider to his Samoan cultural heritage, and
Why Pay Two Rents, a humorous celebration about two partners in business and in life,
Stan Selub and Paul Miller who have seen the transformation of Greenwich Village
from bohemian haven into commercial center.
A listing of the films to
be presented in each of the three programs follows:
Coming Of Age - May 4
Margaret Mead: A Portrait by a Friend by Jean Rouch, 1977
30 min (U.S.)
Islands by Amiel Courtin-Wilson, Vincent Heimann, 2000, 26 min. (Australia)
Why Pay Two Rents by Remy Weber, 2001, 28 min. (U.S.)
Power To The People - May 11
Scenes of Resistance by Alejandra Navarro Smith, 2000, 24
min. (Mexico) Away from the headlines, Zapatista villagers strive for self-sufficiency
in a country whose government routinely ignores the rights and concerns of its indigenous
population.
The Making of the Revolution by Katarina Rejger. Eroc van den Broek, 2001
52 min. (Yugoslavia)"A startling inside account of the last two weeks of Slobodan
Milosevic's government, as seen from the perspective of the Serbian youth opposition
group OTPOR" working through the Internet in English, a language the police didn't
know.
Spotlight Indonesia
- May 18
A Poet by Garin Nugroho, 2000, 90 min. A drama (Indonesia)
about Ibrahim Kadir, a traditional poet from the village of Takengon in Aceh, who
was accused of being a Communist and was imprisoned for 22 days in 1965. This startling
dramatic feature, which uses the form of the Ceh, combines the oral tradition of
Aceh with dramatic monologue as Kadir plays himself, a detainee with an uncertain
future who witnesses the anguish of those awaiting execution.
The Poet of Linge Homeland by Aryo Danusiri, 2000, 25 min. (Indonesia). A
portrait of the master poet Ibrahim Kadir and the art form of didong poetry (used
by the feature film as its dramatic form), which had been banned for eight months
at the time of filming.
The series is sponsored at Portland State University by the Departments of Anthropology,
Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Speech Communication, with the support of
the PSU Foundation and the PSU Speakers Board. The programs are free and open
to the public. The evening's films will be introduced by a speaker with expertise
in the areas represented by the films and discussion will follow the screening.
Dr. Michelle Gamburd, who teaches Anthropology at PSU, urges people to take advantage
of this rare opportunity to learn more about the issues and concerns that affect
us all in our ever-shrinking and increasingly interconnected world.
Saturday evenings, May 4, 11, & 18. Doors open at 6:45 p.m. and programs begin
at 7:00: All programs are free and open to the public. Call: 503 725-4938. Check
the web site for other showing sites in the West.
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