CREATION AND CHANTING OF LIK YAAT
Japan, 2011, 30 min
Ito Satoru
26.01.2013 20:20
This film focuses how people share a collective sense of history through the auditory experience. dehong Tai people embrace Theravada Budhism. In ordes to live better in this world and the next, they perform dignified rituals and acquire "merit". For the rituals they spend years and save money, then they do a good deed like contribution of Budhist statues and building the bridges. chief donators commission an intellectual to write historical scriptures to hand down the good deed to posterity. It is called "Lik Yaat" in Tai and written with beautiful words and rhyme. After the cultural revolution, only a few intellectuals can create and chant "Lik Yaat" now. There is a woman, Wan Xiand-ya, who strives for the tradition of "Lik Yaat". She should be their first and last female intellectual who can write "Lik Yaat" in Tai history.
Ito Satotu studied Cultural Anthropology and Ethnomusicology in The Graduate University for Advanced Studies. now he id a Ph.D candidate and Visiting Researcher of National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. He had done his 3 year fieldwork at tai village in Dehong prefecture, Yunnan Province, China. This film his first Anthropological film.
Director: Ito Satoru
Language of dialogues: Thai language in Dehong area, Yunnan Province, China
Language of subtitles: English, Czech
Launching of film,awards:
The Best Film, debut Competition, 6th Moscow International International Festival of Visual Anthropology (8-12 October 2012, Moscow, Russia)
12th RAI International Festival of Etnographic Film (23-26 june 2011, London, England)
9th WorldFilm - Tartu festival of visual culure (19-25 March 2012, Tartu Estonia)
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?
