FUNERAL SEASON
Kanada / Kamerun, 2011, 87 min
Matthew Lancit
26.01.2013 21:10
Director Matthew Lancit quit his day job to travel across Cameroon, visiting some of the world’s most joyous funeral celebrations. Throughout his excursion in the foreign countryside, Lancid is taken with the locals’belief that the dead are still roaming the Earth, leading Lancit himself to experience what might be spiritual connection with his own ancestors. Ultimately, Lancit learns about an altogetgher new way to celebrate the dead, their memory, and the way in which they still affect and even interact in our lives.
Matthew Lancit grew up in Toronto, Canada before leaving for New York to study writting and literature at Sarah lawrence College, and filmmaking at NYU´s Tisch School of the Arts. Most recently, Funeral Season has been chosen for preservation by the Library and Archives of Canada. Lancit currently divides his time between Toronto and Paris.
Director: Matthew Lancit
Language of dialogues: French, English
Language of subtitles: English, Czech
Launching of film, awards:
Rising Star Award, Canada International Film Festival, 2011
Menzioni Speciali, Contro-Sguardi, Italy, 2010
Prix du Premiere Film Professionnel, Traces de Viwe, France, 2011
Award, Dallas Black Film festival, USA, 2011
The film is an attempt to question the ways in which the visual narrative is constructed when using the feedback method. The feedback provided by the people involved (the young performers but also the elders) in the Babaluda Feast, turned out to be very important in offering an insight to the ways in which the Feast was depicted by the visual ethnographer. By recoding the shared visual ethnography, that was arranged in big groups in a large screening rooms, but also in small groups in private houses, the film will try to experiment the ways in which the visual narrative is constructed by looking at, the looked at. The montage method of the film will use a chronotopic montage technique (Bakhtin), in which the time and space unity will be enacted in a visual ethnographic present.
Voroneț is one of the best known and the most visited monastery`s in Romania, especially because of church Saint George. On the wall, it has preserved a lot of frescos (murals) from the 15th century with intensive and not so faded colors. Cultural importance of this place has been appreciated by UNESCO as well, when it has added it to its heritage list. The surrealistic image is created by 6 days observations of the place of monastery and surrounded market place, which are crossed real and symbolic ways of people. Intensive perception of the most fascinating mural of Last Judgement creates mosaic confrontation with the mirror of ideas, visions, watched and listened. Voroneț symbolically conceptualizes the way of life, we believe in.
