Welcome to the Worldfilm festival!
Seventh Worldfilm festival takes place from March 22nd–28th, 2010. The film program contains documentaries with anthropological spirit from around the world, by introducing different societies and enabling to think along to different lives and approaches to life. The screen is filled with travellers, contemporary shamans, inhabitants of the penthouse-apartments in Southern America, child soldiers in Uganda, childhood in Papua New-Guinea and lots of others with their unique experiences.
The central topic of the film programme is aging. The issue of aging, which is rather denied than understood in Estonian society, is explained by touching and interesting films about elderly people, which tell about how different cultures approach aging. This special program, opened by a workshop with special screenings and a discussion, followed by the films, distributed throughout the general programme, aims to understand old age as a cultural category, asking, what is universal about it and how different can be the ways to become old and be old. All these questions are very relevant, because we are part of societies, which are different from earlier ones. A significant part of the members of the societies are considered to be old. Instead of treating it as an economic burden and social problem, the festival approaches aging as lived experiences of the people and thinks, how the societal structures have to adapt to this new reality.
As a sharp contrast, we will have the look into the elite penthouse apartements, which are themselves overlooking the upwardly mobile cities of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Recife in Brazil. The filmmaker explores, how the architecture adds a physical dimension to the separation between country’s social classes and economically privileged people. Penthouse apartments up in the sky separate people living there from the gunfire between rival gangs and crowds of ant-sized people - pedestrians and sunbathers. This look and distance is similar to the men in cinematographic „Solitary life of cranes“, climbing day by day up to the cranes not just to build and create, but have a distance look to the city and gaze the people living there, their roads and buildings, which live with their own secret lives.
As always, Worldfilm festival is a meeting point for people who are nomads in their soul, being on the road to either to face different people and cultures, or to catch their own shadow: a trip to Asia in the footsteps of Swiss travel writer, another trip to get in touch with Indian 15th century mystical poet Kabir, trip to the other side of the world, where a song is being prepared to be presented in honour of you, mongoloan and amazonian shamans facing the outer world with tourists – curious experience-consumers, French filmmakers travelling to discover the „Moscow“ of Siberia, are just many of the stories, you are invited to see!
Besides main programme, festival also introduces the retrospecitve of the visual anthropological filmmaker, which focuses on Alaskan documentary filmmaker and anthropologist Leonard Kamerling, who has in 1972–1988 completed several films about native people of Alaska, together with anthropologist and filmmaker Sarah Elder. They produced films jointly with village councils. Their approach to making anthropological films together with native communities stemmed from their personal experiences of living and working in these communities and seeing collective working and decisionmaking. Thus, the approach to filmmaking, based on collective and shared decisions, became inevitable. When they started these experiments, similar models were not existant, also the traditional anthropology didn’t encourage this approach, as it looked to ethnographic filmmaking with a slight decision. Idea about shared or collective anthropology as an ethical basis of ethnographic research, was not yet part of Western academic culture.
In addition to the films about Alaska, the film programme introduces a affectionate story about a small village school in Japan, Hokkaido. The main protagonist of the film has not aimed to teach just reading and writing to children, his aim is to educate their mind and soul, doing it from heart to heart.
In cooperation with Jaan
Tõnisson Institute, festival offers special programme and workshop on World
education to shcoolchildren. This program and workshop is aimed at youngsters with
interest in documentary film and enable them to watch films in a unique
festival environment. Film screenings are complemented by discussions in the
theory and practice of filmaking, aiming to develop critical approach to film
and understanding better the film language, filmmaker’s agenda and the ways,
films are constructed.
We wish you a pleasant festival!
Pille Runnel,
director of the festival