Egyptian birth ritual
In Egypt, a birth ritual called el-sebou', meaning "the seventh," happens on the seventh day following the physical birth of a child of either sex and is celebrated by Coptic and Muslim families of all status groups, rural and urban. The ceremony celebrates the newborn's crossing a threshold from a neutral gender and status into a world of gender differentiation and family hierarchy. This particular sebou' is celebrated for twins, a boy and a girl, in a rising middle class Muslim family in urban Egypt. Anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi portrays the sebou' ritual as a rite of passage with the universal three phases of transition (separation, liminality, incorporation) and as the key ceremony in an individual's life cycle until marriage. The film's perspective highlights the central role of the female ritual leader and provides a kinesthetic spatial sense of the ceremony.
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B.A.T.A.M. tells the contrasting stories of two women: Wati, a young factory worker, and Dewi, a prostitute, both of whom live through a dramatic transformation on the Indonesian island of Batam, located on Singapore's doorstep.
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A calling to care is the inspiring story of 55 year-old Grace Stanley, a Canadian nurse who left her home and prestigious career behind to answer a calling halfway around the world in Karachi, Pakistan. Teaching nursing to local women in a strict Muslim culture that forbids them to even to touch men is a formidable task. However, Grace challenges her own values and belief systems to find common ground with her students, helping them to excel and feel respect for themselves in a culture that doesn't respect them. Whether it is getting her hands painted with henna, swimming fully-clothed in the ocean, or marching bravely with them on International Women's Day, Grace bonds with her students in a very special way, and ultimately discovers how the West can learn a lot more from the Third World than she ever thought.
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Ms. Taki Kudo says she has been able to connect with deities since she was six or seven years old. Even in modern Japan, mediums like Taki Kudo are in demand, providing such traditional services as expelling a curse and invoking spirits for health and long life.
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For 200 years groups of Lahu have been migrating from southwestern China into the highlands of Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" region.Though they share much with other migrants in the ethnic patchwork of the region, the Lahu maintain a vigorous sense of themselves as a distinct people. New Years is their prime time for celebrating what it means to be Lahu.
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Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event--the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf--as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-up has resonated with viewers around the world.
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battle for the city
In 1960, Jane Jacobs's book The death and life of great American cities sent shockwaves through the architecture and planning worlds, with its exploration of the consequences of modern planners' and architects' reconfiguration of cities. Jacobs was also an activist, who was involved in many fights in mid-century New York, to stop "master builder" Robert Moses from running roughshod over the city. This film retraces the battles for the city as personified by Jacobs and Moses, as urbanization moves to the very front of the global agenda. Many of the clues for formulating solutions to the dizzying array of urban issues can be found in Jacobs’s prescient text, and a close second look at her thinking and writing about cities is very much in order. This film sets out to examine the city of today through the lens of one of its greatest champions.
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German-occupied Poland, summer of 1943. More than anything, Hedwig, an indefatigable mother of five, wants to keep her well-organized life as is. After all, she has worked her fingers to the bone to create a fragrant slice of paradise to raise her children, and nothing will change that. If only her husband, the distinguished SS officer and Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess, weren't always burdened by his duties. But perfection is a fleeting illusion. As the oblivious life of the commandant's wife unravels in cloudless bliss, Rudolf finds himself swamped with work, saddled with testing a new ventilation design and overseeing the installation of a highly effective Topf and Sons multi-muffle, non-stop incineration oven system. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that just a hair's breadth away from the peaceful and idyllic Höss household, the unimaginable horrors of the Final Solution are unfolding, and muffled, blood-curdling noises blemish Hedwig's verdant utopia.
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When teenage Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley at a party, the man who is already a meteoric rock-and-roll superstar becomes someone entirely unexpected in private moments: a thrilling crush, an ally in loneliness, a vulnerable best friend. Through Priscilla's eyes, Sofia Coppola tells the unseen side of a great American myth in Elvis and Priscilla's long courtship and turbulent marriage, from a German army base to his dream-world estate at Graceland, in this deeply felt and ravishingly detailed portrait of love, fantasy, and fame.
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Kwakiutl Indian life on the Northwest Coast
In the land of the war canoes is a re-release of In the land of the head hunters--"a drama of primitive life on the shores of the North Pacific"--the first feature-length film to exclusively star Indigenous North Americans. An epic story of love and war set before European contact, it featured actors from Kwakwaka'wakw communities in British Columbia--a people already famous then for their spectacular visual culture and performances. It was originally filmed in the summer of 1914 at Kwakwaka'wakw villages on Vancouver Island and released as a silent motion picture. The footage, owned by the Field Museum of Natural History, was restored in 1973 by the Burke Museum, University of Washington, and now includes a soundtrack of Kwak'wala dialogue, music, and chants.
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Garden of children looks at the history of Kindergarten and the current state of early childhood education in America. The original play-based, design education concept of Froebel Kindergarten was radically altered 100 years ago by John Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, and other educational leaders. Today, the remnants of Froebel's work can be seen in the offshoots it inspired: Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia. The cultural impact of Froebel's work is immense, and using new interviews with top researchers in the fields of education, history, design, technology, mathematics, psychology, the full impact of Kindergarten can finally be seen.
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A compelling call for justice, Stolen time follows charismatic elder rights lawyer Melissa Miller as she takes on the corporate for-profit nursing-home industry--an industry notorious for its lack of transparency and accountability. As the legal battle unfolds, families, frontline caregivers and change-makers chronicle an urgent crisis with ramifications, and inspiration, for us all.
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Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain
Amelie, first a lonely child, then a shy young waitress with a fantasy life of her own, discovers joy in manipulating situations to make others happy, but is not sure how to deal with her own chance of love and happiness.
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The snake charmer is a short ethnographic documentary outlining the family history and magical roots of a group of nomadic Rajasthani snake charmers--or Madari--living in rural Gujarat, northwest India. While the story is told as a fable, the scenes were shot on the outskirts of the town of Dhrangadhra, Gujarat. The Madari live in tents on the edge of town, in an enclave known as Vadipara or "snake charmers' alley." Despite the abolition of the caste system after the establishment of the Republic of India in 1947, the snake charmers remain on the fringes of Hindu society; they belong to the "Madari Varna," a sub-caste of the Untouchable caste. The principal ethnographer on the project was Dr. Jayasinhji "Bapa" Jhala.
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The story of American poet Emily Dickinson from her early days as a schoolgirl to her later years as a reclusive, unrecognized artist. Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson personifies the wit, intellectual independence, and pathos of the poet whose genius only came to be recognized after her death. Terence Davies exquisitely evokes Dickinson's deep attachment to her close-knit family along with the manners, mores, and spiritual convictions that Dickinson struggled with, and transcended, in her poetry.
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The filmmakers examine a country where death squad leaders are celebrated as heroes, challenging them to re-enact their real-life mass killings in the style of the American movies they love. The hallucinatory result is a cinematic fever dream, a journey into the imaginations of mass murderers and the banal regime of corruption and impunity they inhabit.
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Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990) has been acclaimed as the greatest Russian filmmaker to appear since the golden age of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. The film was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to "Socialist realism." Its director, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in a gulag. Aesthetically the most extreme film ever made in the U.S.S.R., Pomegranates, his hallucinatory epic account of the life of the 18th Century Armenian national poet, Sayat Nova, conveys the glory of what a cinema of high art can be.
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In 1911, famed Northwest photographer Edward S. Curtis travelled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to visit the Kwakwaka'wakw. By the next year, needing money for his project and to add to his research and still photography work, Curtis decided that the best way to record the traditional way of life and ceremonies of the Kwakwaka'wakw was to make one of the first feature motion pictures--the story of a love triangle and revenge among the Kwakwaka'wakw of British Columbia. In the land of the head hunters--"a drama of primitive life on the shores of the North Pacific"--was the first feature-length film to exclusively star Indigenous North Americans. An epic story of love and war set before European contact, it featured actors from Kwakwaka'wakw communities in British Columbia--a people already famous then for their spectacular visual culture and performances. This edition was made from original film footage owned by Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois.
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I'd rather stay is an intimate documentary that explores the joys and challenges of growing older in one's own home and neighbourhood. Told through the diverse experiences of 5 older adults, the film explores fear, resilience, and the importance of building more accessible and inclusive communities. I'd rather stay was guided by the Centre for Hip Health and Mobility's research on how the neighbourhood built environment is affecting the health and wellbeing of Canada's rapidly aging population.
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