VELINGARA THEATER
Spain, 2012, 56 min
Javier Arcos & Javier Jarillo
25.01.2013 21:40
In Velingara, southern Senegal a group of teeneagers struggle to do theater. To go on stage and be part of the trip that will take them through the region of Casamance, they must fight against their fears and their own families, choosing between tradition and modernity.
Javier Arcos, doctor and filmmaker, is actually combining his work as a filmmaker and as a doctor in health humanitarian emergencies. In 2007 he created the company Synechia Film with Javier Jarillo, filmmaker and producer, specialized in Social Cinema. "Shame in the time of Cholera" is their first feature film. During 2011 they have been working in four documentaries of the International Library of Huanitarian Medicine (in collaboration with World Health Association and the Spanish Agency of Cooperation).
Director: Javier Arios & Javier Jarillo
Production: Sinechia Films
Language of dialogues: French, wolof & poulard
Language of subtitles: English, Czech
Launching of Film:
Festival Internacional de Cine y Video Alternativo y Comunitario "Ojo al Sancocho" (Columbia)
Festival Di Cinema Africand Di verona (Italy)
Montana Cine International Film fetsival (United States)
The documentary follows the invasion of inquisitive filmmakers-cum-agroturists in Gerník, a Czech village in the Romanian province of Banát. Members of the team of the Prague-based NGO Inventura, co-authors of the documentary Earthlings, who will you vote for?, travelled to Banát to create a portrait both of a village dying out and of an anthropologist who fights with romantic fantasies about Czech villages in this locality. Is the village, which is being abandoned by whole families who leave for allegedly better life in the Czech Republic, a paradise on Earth, a fully preserved countryside of the 19th century? What do those who stayed think and what were their reasons? How do new media and wind farms fit into the idealized image of the traditional agrarian region?
In the Basque country, the local distribution of agricultural products plays a very important role. Despite the strong pressure of foreign import, the traditional markets are an inseparable part of every day life of local people. Thus number of family farms has continued with its first-class production until these days. However, work at a farm is usually connected with a man – a man herdsman, a man farmer, a man trader. Eventhough, a woman is an important part of this world, she is usually overshadowed. But how is the everyday reality of a woman – landowner? To make a woman visible in the context of agricultural production was one of the goals of the documentary „Gaur 8 Azokan“, which resulted from the need of local rural women to emancipate, and whose hard work we do not know at all. The complementary character of gender roles within the rural world is shown in the light of anthropological perspective, and at the end, it will be clear that the rural world could never exist without both components – the productive and reproductive, the male and female.
