The Archaeology Channel

                     

Stori Tumbuna: Ancestors’ Tales was conceived as an opportunity for the Lak of New Ireland, a large island in Papua New Guinea, to tell their stories in their way.  In the words of filmmaker Paul Wolffram, “It’s a story of how I came to know the people of the region and how my story became forever woven into their own....  I was to become enmeshed in events that resulted in bloodshed and death.  What’s more, I was held responsible.”  The film was shot over several years and takes its structure from the traditional mythologies of the region.  Unlike most films based on the lives of traditional communities that are told from the point of view of an outsider, this film adopts indigenous narrative structures and presents a collaborative account that privileges local points of view and the Lak ethos.

Length: 89 min.
Country: New Zealand
Language: Tok Pisin, Tok Baluam, English
Director: Paul Wolffram
Producer: Handmade Productions
Producer Web site: www.handmade.net.nz
Distributor: Documentary Educational Resources
Distributor Web site: www.der.org

Awards/Selections:

Official Selection, New Zealand International Film Festival 2011
Jean Rouch Festival International 2011
Göttingen Ethnographic Film Festival 2012

                     

The Thousand and One Nights is a book of the strange and marvelous.  It tells of genies, good and bad; animals with the gift of human speech; magicians commanding evil powers; and fire-worshiping alchemists.  Of  magic carpets, talismans, and spells; bird-women and trees with human heads; snake queens and rocs, the giant birds with holy eggs; and a magical island and uncrossable seas.  These fantastic creatures inhabiting enchanted places produce a powerful imaginary force and a truly spectacular vision, while other characters engage in the most ordinary, everyday forms of human behavior.  In this film we see how this collection of tales began long ago in the mouths of Indian storytellers and accumulated through centuries and across many lands until they were published for delighted readers in Europe.

Length: 80 min.
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Director: Bruno Ulmer and Catherine Ulmer-Lopez
Producer: Cyrille Perez and Gilles Perez, 13 Productions
Producer Web site: www.13productions.fr
Distributor: ARTE France and 13 Productions
Distributor Web site: www.13productions.fr

Awards/Selections: N/A

                     

Cory Mann is a quirky Tlingit businessman hustling to make a dollar in Juneau, Alaska.  Each year, he puts his business on hold and spends a summer smoking salmon at his family’s traditional fish camp.  Here, the film weaves together Mann’s unique personal history, the largely untold history of his people and his effort to maintain a connection to Native American traditions while balancing the demands of modern-day life.  A playful exploration of Native American identity, Smokin’ Fish chronicles one man’s attempts to navigate the collision between the modern world and an ancient culture.

Length: 80 min.
Country: USA
Language: English & Tlingit
Director: Luke Griswold-Tergis and Cory Mann
Producer: Kaudli Nutz Productions
Producer Web site: N/A
Distributor: Documentary Educational Resources
Distributor Web site: www.der.org

Awards/Selections:

Best doc, Montreal First Peoples Film Fest, 2012
Best Doc, Arizona International Film Fest, 2012
Audience award, Cowichan International Film Fest, 2012
Gathenburg Film Fest, 2013
Wild &Scenic Environmental Film Festival, 2012
Available Light Film Fest, Canada, 2012
Cowichan International Film Fest, Canada, 2012
Salem Documentary Film Fest, 2012
DOXA, Canada, 2012
Port Townsend Film Festival, 2012
Festival International Jean Rouch , 2012
IDFA, 2011
Mill Valley International 2011
Hawaii International 2011
Montreal First Poeples (Terres en Vue) Film Festival, 2011
Anchorage International 2011
American Indian Film Festival, San Francisco USA 2011
Society for Visual Anthropology 2011

                     

Beneath the Medieval city of Narni, an Umbrian town in central Italy, a  young team of cavers discovers a series of mysterious underground rooms dating to the Holy Inquisition.  They began a thirty year quest for the truth behind the underground rooms and the meaning of a complex sequence of graffiti that was applied to the walls by an enigmatic prisoner in 1759.  A series of chance encounters and coincidences illuminates a trail of stolen documents, secret archives and an archaeological quest to reconstruct a page deleted from history.

Length: 58 min.
Country: Italy
Language: Italian with English subtitles
Director: Giorgio Serafini Prosperi
Producer: Association of Subterranean Culture
Producer Web site: narnisotterranea.it
Distributor: Association of Subterranean Culture
Distributor Web site: narnisotterranea.it

Awards/Selections:

Lidf 2012
Lidf 2013
VAKANZ: Salon du Tourisme at Luxemburg (January 2013)
International Film festival of Archaeology at Rovereto: Winner for the Category “Archaelogy and Society”

                     

Ee Soon Wei is a young man with a mission to save his family’s heritage, and coincidentally one of Malaysia’s oldest printing establishments, the Royal Press.  Coming from a family of publishers and pressers, Soon Wei has never really been interested in his family’s origins.  Only after returning to his hometown and stepping onto the dark, dusty wooden floors of the Royal Press, founded by his grandfather seven decades ago, has he felt the re-connection to his past.   But the printing press is now facing a losing battle with the more modern and profitable printing shops and is on the brink of closing down.  Set in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Malacca, this story follows Soo Wei on his quest to save the Royal Press and to give it a 21st Century future by transforming it into Malaysia’s first printing press living museum.

Length: 47 min.
Country: Malaysia
Language: English
Director: Pam Heng
Producer: DB Pictures SDN BHD and FINAS
Producer Web site: N/A
Distributor: National Film Development Corporation Malaysia
Distributor Web site: www.finas.gov.my

Awards/Selections: N/A

                     

Only a small number of traditional boatmen are still carrying out their craft of building Perahus on a small island called Pulau Duyong, or Mermaid Island.  This island sits in an estuary in the Sungai Terengganu River in Malaysia.  Through boatmen eyes, we will explore the delicate work of traditional boat making that has been overtaken by the development of modernization.  This kind of boat making is done by memory and has been passed down for centuries from master craftsmen to their apprentices; there are no blueprints.  It is here where many tourists travel to see this art being created in the absence of modern technology.  But how much longer will the tradition survive?

Length: 47 min.
Country: Malaysia
Language: English
Director: Azhar Rudin
Producer: Monsoon Pictures and National Film Development Corporation Malaysia     
Producer Web site: N/A
Distributor: National Film Development Corporation Malaysia      
Distributor Web site: www.finas.gov.my

Awards/Selections: N/A

                     

In 2000, Yvan Pallier, a young French archaeologists, found several 5000 year old marble rings in Brittany, France.  These rings bear a strange resemblance to the talismans worn by the Tuareg of Mali until the 20th Century for protection and prosperity.  Pallier started looking for the manufacturers of these bracelets made of African marble in the village of Hombori.  Tontoni Meikouba, one of the last sculptors, opens up his workshop for him and shares trade secrets.  He tells him about the commercial route these rings take through the Sahara and the Sahel.  The bracelets are made by the Songhai ethnic group to which Meikouba belongs.  The stones are extracted in outdoor marble quarries thought to be sacred.  According to animists, the sculptors are still sacrificing hens and sheep in these quarries as a token of gratitude to the rocks.  These talismans used to be worn by Bozo fisherman, convinced that it would strengthen their harpoons.

Length: 56 min.
Country: France
Language: English
Director: Fred Hilgemann
Producer: Regis Ayache
Producer Web site: www.ekla-prod.com
Distributor: EKLA Production
Distributor Web site: N/A

Awards/Selections: N/A

                     

Four thousand years before the Incas and the arrival of the Conquistadors, the Andes and the northern coast were the cradle of Peru’s earliest civilizations.  This is known as the Formative Period, when the religious class began to build sanctuaries that became centers of learning.   People traveled long distances to visit in search of knowledge of the best seasons to plant their crops or when to expect the arrival of the El Niño weather phenomenon.  The Chavín, Caral, Ventarrón, Sechin, and Cupisnique cultures reached surprising levels of technological development, with works like the Cumbemayo canals of the Cajamarca culture, which is the largest work of hydrological engineering carried out in the ancient Americas.  Millennial Peru journeys back through the most ancient periods of Peru’s complex societies.

Length: 52  min.
Country: Spain
Language: English
Director: Jose Manuel Novoa
Producer: Explora Films
Producer Web site: www.explorafilms.com
Distributor: Explora Films
Distributor Web site: www.explorafilms.com

Awards/Selections: N/A

                     

Lost Nation: the Ioway 2 tells of the time when the Ioway were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands to a reservation in Kansas.  Ioway leader, White Cloud (the Younger), believed the move would ensure survival for his people.  However, broken treaties, land loss, the end of communal living, and attempts to diminish their unique language and culture led to the establishment of a second Ioway Tribe and their own “trail of tears.”  The film features archaeological sites located in the Midwest with connections to the Ioway and their ancestors, the Oneota.

Length: 55 min.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Kelly Rundle
Producer: Kelly and Tammy Rundle
Producer Web site: www.iowaymovie.com
Distributor: Fourth Wall Films
Distributor Web site: www.fourthwallfilms.com

Awards/Selections:

Best Documentary Feature, Iowa Independent Film Festival 2013;
Official Selection Landlocked Film Festival;
Premiere Museum of Natural History/University of Iowa, Iowa City

                     

The Mursi tribe resides in the basin of the Omo River, in the east African state of Ethiopia.  Mursi women are known for placing large plates in their lower lips and wearing enormous, richly decorated earrings, which have become a subject of tourist attraction in recent years.;  Each year, hundreds of Western tourists come to see the unusually adorned natives, so that posing for camera-toting visitors has become the main source of income for the Mursi.  To make more money, they embellish their “costumes” and finery to appear more exotic to the outsiders.  However, by exaggerating their habits and lifestyle in such a manner, they are beginning to disintegrate their traditional culture.  This film portrays the complex relationship between tourism and indigenous communities by revealing the intimate and intriguing thoughts of a Mursi woman from southern Ethiopia and a Dutch tourist as they prepare to meet each other.  This humorous, yet simultaneously chilling, film shows the destructive impact tourism has on traditional communities.

Length: 25 min.
Country: Netherlands
Language: English and Mursi
Director: Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers
Producer: Ilja Kok and Willem Timmers
Producer Web site: www.icamerayou.com
Distributor: Documentary Educational Resources
Distributor Web site: www.der.org

Awards/Selections:

Grand Prix Award, Montenegro Film Festival, Montenegro, 2012
Silver Horseshoe Award, Asterfest International Film Festival, Macedonia, 2012
Best Director, Bir Duino Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Kyrgyzstan, 2012
Audience Award, Scences International Debut Film Festival, The Netherlands, 2012
NTR Special Mention, Go Short International Short Film Festival, The Netherlands, 2012