In the rainforests of Malaysia, the Tualang tree stands high above all others, hosting hives of Asiatic Giant Bees that pollinate hundreds of plant species. Once a year, 85-year-old rice farmer Salleh Mohammad Nor and his team of honey hunters set out to scale these 60 meter tall trees in the forests of Pedu, Kedah. They only have a brief window of time to harvest their prize: one of the highest grades of honey in the world. Steeped in traditional beliefs and practices, the honey hunters take us on a journey to discover how ancient know-how may offer the key to understanding the science behind the giant bees.
Screening time: Saturday, May 6, 11:24 pm , The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 24 min.
Country: Malaysia
Language: English
Director: Abdul Hamid Abdullah
Producer: Ira Rakiz Tuffile
Producer Web site: http://mataviareka.com/
Distributor: National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (FINAS)
Distributor Web site: http://www.finas.gov.my/
On June 30, 2016, the Italian town of Termini Imerese inaugurated a new Antiquarium which joins the Archaeological Museum and highlights the Temple of Victory in the nearby ancient Greek city of Himera. The exhibits cover findings such as the burial of 10,000 riders with their horses, a unique event in the history of Greek archaeology in Sicily. The film illustrates the epic moments of the battle, the victorious ending with the construction of the Temple of Victory, the subsequent defeat and destruction of Himera in 408 BC, and the archaeological excavations from the 19th century to today.
Screening time: Saturday, May 6, 2:34 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 11 min.
Country: Italy
Language: Italian with English subtitles
Director: Davide Borra
Producer: Himera Archaeological Park, Italy
Producer Web site: http://www.regione.sicilia.it/beniculturali/dirbenicult/database/page_musei/pagina_musei.asp?ID=50&IdSito=65
Distributor: Himera Archaeological Park, Italy
Distributor Web site: http://www.regione.sicilia.it/beniculturali/dirbenicult/database/page_musei/pagina_musei.asp?ID=50&IdSito=65
Wattle and Daub is a composite building material used for making walls, in which a woven lattice of wooden strips called wattle is daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw. Wattle and daub has been used for at least 6,000 years and is still an important construction material in many parts of the world. Many historic buildings include wattle and daub construction, and the technique is becoming popular again in more developed areas as a low-impact sustainable building technique.
Screening time: Sunday, May 7, 4:30 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 64 min.
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Director: Antoine Chene
Producer: Antoine Chene
A team of artists, visual artists and prehistorians was appointed to oversee the creation of the Pont d’Arc Cavern, a detailed replica of Chauvet Cave. The film follows the Catalan painter Miquel Barcelò as he observes and comments on the work of the artists while they create the reproductions. Going back and forth between the original Cave and the Cavern, the film gives the viewer an exceptional feeling of intimacy with the paintings and drawings. It enables us to feel their emotional power and understand the incredible techniques used by artists in deep prehistoric time. Here, one is facing the works of great masters whose art can be compared to that of Rembrandt and the surrealist, Miro.
Screening time: Saturday, May 6, 1:00 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 52 min.
Country: France
Language: English
Director: Christian Tran
Producer: Andana Films
Producer Web site: http://www.andanafilms.com/
Distributor: Andana Films
Distributor Web site: http://www.andanafilms.com/
Awards/Selections:
Audience Prize, International Review of Archaeological Cinema, Rovereto, Italy, 2015
International Festival of Films On Art, Montreal, Canada, 2016
Amiens Festival of Archaeological Film, Amiens, France, 2016
International Festival of Science Documentary Films of Olomouc, Czech Republic, 2016
The Atigh Jamé Mosque—the oldest mosque in Shiraz, Iran, and one of the oldest in the country—is the subject of this documentary. Begun in AD 894 under the short-lived Saffarid dynasty of Iran, this mosque has been rebuilt and restored many times. The story begins with the birth of the mosque and continues to the present. A square-shaped building stands out in the center of this mosque. This building is God's House, a unique structure in which people used to keep holy books. The film describes the good times and bad times of the mosque—and God’s House—throughout its history.
Screening time: Sunday, May 7, 10:40 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 32 min.
Country: Iran
Language: English
Director: Fazlollah Tari
Producer: Fazlollah Tari
Producer Web site: http://www.tarifilm.com/contact/index.html
Distributor: Fazlollah Tari
Distributor Web site: http://www.tarifilm.com/contact/index.html
Awards/Selections:
Best Documentary, Iranian Broadcast Film Festival, 2013
Shanghai Film Festival, 2016
International Review of Archaeological Cinema, Rovereto, Italy, 2013
Best Cinematography, Rouyesh International Film Festival, Iran, 2015
Nominated for best research, Tehran International Short Film Festival, Iran, 2014
The Ancient City of Oinoanda, close to Fethiye, Turkey, hosts presumably the largest philosophical inscription of the ancient world. The inscription, 65 to 80 meters long, was constructed by Diogenes of Oinoanda so as to convey Epicurean philosophy to the next generations and city’s visitors. The film focuses on the efforts to pursue this aim of Diogenes. Epicurean approaches to concepts such as pleasure, happiness, friendship, dreams, and gods are discussed around the peculiarities of research history. As senior researcher Martin Ferguson Smith puts it, the content of the inscription applies surprisingly well to the problems of contemporary society.
Screening time: Saturday, May 6, 1:53 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 33 min.
Country: Turkey
Language: English and Turkish (with English subtitles)
Director: Nazim Guveloglu
Producer: The Middle East Technical University
Producer Web site: http://www.metu.edu.tr
Distributor: Nazim Guveloglu
Distributor Web site: http://www.if-eye.com
Awards/Selections:
Firenze Archeofilm Festival (2018, Italy)
International Festival of Archaeological Cinema in Licodia Eubea (2017, İtalya) - Audience Best Film Award
The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival (2017, USA)
International Festival of Archaeological Cinema in Rovereto (2017, Italy)
International Archaeological Film Festival of the Bidasoa (2016, Spain)
International Archaeology Film Festival in Split (2016, Croatia) - 3rd Award
Agon Archaeological Film Festival (2016, Greece) - Award of Originality
Ankara International Film Festival, (2013, Turkey)
Turkish National Television Documentary Awards, Professional Category (2013, Turkey)
Cinarchea: International Archaeology Film and Art Festival (Germany, 2013)
Cannes Film Festival Turkey Stand Selection (France, 2013)
Imagine a traffic jam of the largest commercially available dump trucks. Now, imagine that bumper to bumper line-up, each truck heaped high with earth, extending for over 400 miles! Welcome to the largest single construction project in ancient America: Fort Ancient. Over 200 years have passed since American explorers encountered the mysterious, giant, earthen walls overlooking Ohio’s Little Miami River. The name Fort Ancient is correct in one respect: it is truly ancient. Work began 2,100 years ago, but it’s doubtful that it was ever intended to be a fort. Instead, this was a giant ceremonial center designed to draw people in, rather than repel them. High-tech archaeology is revealing long-buried features. Now, for the first time, some of what has mystified observers for two centuries is starting to make sense. Here is a complex astronomical observatory, a New World Stonehenge, and much, much more!
Screening time: Friday, March 5, 9:45 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 42 min.
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Gray Warriner
Producer: Camera One
Producer Web site: http://www.cameraone.us/pages/whoweare.html
Distributor: Camera One
Distributor Web site: http://www.cameraone.us/pages/whoweare.html
Awards/Selections:
Arkhaios Cultural Heritage and Archaeology Film Festival, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, 2016
The establishment of the art of classical ballet in Egypt under the auspices of the state during the Cold War is at the heart of an extraordinary saga, narrated here by its first pioneers. Prima ballerina Magda Saleh and fellow dancers known as the Bolshoi Five recall the founding of the first national ballet school, staffed with Soviet teachers—the early triumphs, collapse and renewed hopes over five decades. The film is a tribute to a group of determined women who have been at the forefront of the struggle to revive the Egyptian art scene from Magda Saleh’s founding of Cairo’s New Opera House to her support today for the Egyptian diaspora in the United States and the initiatives of her students who now carry the torch in Egypt.
Screening time: Sunday, May 7, 1:15 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 117 min.
Country: France, USA, Saudi Arabia, Egypt
Language: English
Director: Hisham Abdel Khalek
Producer: Olivier Delesse, Hisham Abdel Khalek, Saad Bin Mohammed, Wanny Yazan
Producer Web site: www.hishamabdelkhalek.com
Distributor: So Freakantastik
Distributor Web site: www.hishamabdelkhalek.com
Awards/Selections:
3rd best documentary in Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) 2017
Miracle beauty products may be a staple Christmas present today, but they’re not a recent invention. Diane de Poitiers, a French noble woman and mistress of Henry II of France, tried to use gold to preserve her looks—in alchemical law, gold was immutable, and alchemists and apothecaries created various potions to pass this gift on to their customers. This short film is about a French research team’s investigations of Diane’s remains and its discovery that the gold and other minerals she used to preserve her youth were actually slowly poisoning her. The researchers were Philippe Charlier of the Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Garches and Joël Poupon of the Lariboisière Hospital in Paris. Filming was also done in the Louvre Museum in Paris and at the Château d'Anet, where Diane de Poitiers lived. Lilley Mitchell stars as the ghost of Diane.
Screening time: Thursday, May 4, 8:44 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 13 min.
Country: UK
Language: English
Director: Martin Freeth
Producer: Martin Freeth
Producer Web site: www.mfreeth.com
Distributor: British Medical Journal
Distributor Web site: http://www.bmj.com/
Awards/Selections:
French TV, 2011.
The series The Experts Travel Back in Time is a stratigraphic and humorous introduction to some great periods of humanity in western Europe, through the daily lives of the men and women who have gone before us. One important period was the Neolithic Age. Having lived nomadically as hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age, humans of the Neolithic Age began settling down as farmers and gradually became attached to their new homes. This transition to fixed homes led them to build villages and raise livestock in order to sustain growing communities.
Screening time: Friday, May 5th , 9:12 pm, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 4 min. Country: France Language: French with English subtitles Director: Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet Producer: Doncvoila Productions Producer Web site: www.donvoila.net Distributor: Doncvoila Productions Distributor Web site: www.donvoila.net
Awards/Selections:
ICRONOS: International Festival of Archaeological Film, Bordeaux, France, 2016
Seven thousand years ago, peoples along Europe’s Atlantic shores erected thousands of big standing stones, on which they carved mysterious signs. Among them was the Great Menhir, a 330-ton giant that once stood on the shore of the Gulf of Morbihan in French Brittany. An international team of scientists led by the French archaeologist Serge Cassen succeeded in deciphering the symbolic language of those stones. Between history and myth, those ancient signs tell us a story common to all Atlantic cultures during late prehistory: the story of the first sailors!
Screening time: Saturday, May 6, 11:49 am, The Shedd Recital Hall
Length: 52 min.
Country: France
Language: English
Director: Marie Anne Sorba and Jean-Marc-Cazenave
Producer: Fred Hilgemann Films
Producer Web site: http://fredhilgemann.fr/wp/en/177-2/
Distributor: Belaine- Anne Littardi
Distributor Web site: http://www.viadecouvertes.fr/distribution/beliane-distribution-anne-littardi-ph-33-9-77-21-91-35-33-6-63-13-95-01/
Awards/Selections:
TV broadcast on France 3, 2016
Amiens Festival of Archaeological Film, Amiens, France, 2016
International Short Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2016
TV broadcast on France 5, 2016