Funeral season

Streaming video - 2014

"We pray to our ancestors but we do not worship them. You, you need an intermediary, the priest. But for us, our intermediary is the ancestor who is sitting next to God," says Poundé, the old Cameroonian ethnologist, to the young Jewish director from Canada. And with this conclusive statement, everything becomes clear: the funerals in memory of "the dead who are not dead" organized several days or even years following the burial, the chants, brass bands and traditional dancers who accompany and punctuate the village rituals. The ancestral rites struggle to survive in a continuously westernized society of consumption by parading wealth and excess for all to see, even the dead. Funeral season takes the viewer through the ...red dust of Cameroon's laterite slopes and into the heart of the Bamileke country, where one funeral flows into the next. These death celebrations provide an opportunity to see elaborate costumes and masks, festive songs and dances, and lavish feasts, while illuminating the communal links which bind the Bamileke as an ethnic group and society. Along the way, the director befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors. At times, the dialogues alienate him from the locals; at other times they bring the two closer together. Like the dead and the living, they belong to two different worlds often mirroring each other. There is a lightness to be found in this subjective ethnographic film which imaginatively and symbolically turns the gazes of two different worlds upon each other. Filmmaker: Matthew Lancit.

Saved in:
Subjects
Genres
Documentary films
Published
[San Francisco, California, USA] : Kanopy Streaming 2014.
Language
English
Corporate Author
Kanopy (Firm)
Corporate Author
Kanopy (Firm) (-)
Other Authors
Matthew Lancit (producer)
Online Access
A Kanopy streaming video
Cover Image
Item Description
Title from title frames.
Physical Description
1 online resource (1 video file, approximately 147 min.) : digital, .flv file, sound
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).