Documentary film-makers peek at unvisited nooks of the world focus 05/25/2010

Documentary film-makers peek at unvisited nooks of the world

focus 05/25/2010 PARIS — In the mountains of central Nepal, two men with a young boy in tow take cows and goats to graze on verdant slopes, huddling under an umbrella when the summer showers come. At the village in the folds of a valley a woman argues with her neighbor that he is digging too close to the wall of her stone house and then complains about the excrement in every corner of the dirt streets. Such are the ways of the world here, says a documentary shot by a lone anthropologist who stumbled upon a rural village in Nuwakot, Nepal. “I go walking... and there’s a moment. I don’t pick a place, I end up there,” says Stephane Breton, who made the film in Nepal last year and has put together a collection of documentaries from several international film-makers called L’Usage du Monde (The Ways of the World). The less than an hour long films give a personal glimpse of people in usually unseen corners of the globe — from the forests of Gabon, the coal mines of northern China, a far north Russian village on the White Sea, to an old Spanish community in New Mexico. The films were showcased this week at the Musee du Quai Branly, a cross-cultural center in Paris featuring arts largely from the non-Western areas of Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas. The idea of the documentary collection is not a scientific or strictly pedagogical experience of another culture, but rather going to a place like a traveler with eyes open to render a film that is the fruit of a personal experience, according to Stephane Martin, president of the museum which partly sponsored the project. Breton’s documentary La Montee au Ciel (Ascent to the Sky) captures moments in the lives of the people of Nuwakot through eyes of the 51-year-old film-maker. There was no script, no storyboard, no political message. “I do everything alone, it’s just myself being with them,” Breton says. “Since I am an anthropologist to begin with, being there is what my job is all about.”.... MORE   Source:  The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100525com10.html

COMMENTARY EDITORIAL Manny and Willie show FRONTLINE Simplified FEATURE Gandhi’s sex life laid bare in new book BLURBAL THRUSTS Ampatuan’s warden promoted TABLETS OF STONE Endorsement, endearment and elitism VIEWPOINTS Don Quijote de la Mancha FEATURE Katla, the ‘witch’ volcano, looms over Iceland EDITORIAL Stealing the vote FRONTLINE Premature focus Documentary film-makers peek at unvisited nooks of the world MR. EXPOSE Brave losers NO HOLDS BARRED Remembering Lino AN OUTSIDERS VIEW Plus ca change... focus Palin accuses Obama of being in bed with Big Oil