GAUR 8 AZOKAN
Spain, 2012, 16 min
Farapi & Monika Hertlová
26.01.2013 17:30
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.
FARAPI is a consulting company of Applied Anthropology residing in San Sebastian in the Basque country. FARAPI deals with public and commercial orders related to social themes (such as gender equality, migration, minority, market research, etc.). The documentary “Gaur 8 Azokan“ is the second audio-visual output of a longitudial survey concerning the current position of women in the context of rural world in the Basque country.
Monika Hertlova cooperated with FARAPI on the production of the documentary during her working stay. She is also a co-author of short documentary “Don´t dig in to us, we are not dead yet“ (2011), which reflects current activities of Scout Movement in the Czech Republic. At the moment, Monika Hertlova works for the Studio of Visual Ethnography on the Department of Anthropology of Faculty of Philosophy and Art of West Bohemia University in Pilsen in the Czech Republic, where she cooperates on the production of other audio-visual films.
Director: Farapi & Monika Hertlová
Production: Asociación de Mujeres Kimetz
Language of dialogues: Spanish, Basque
Language of subtitles: Czech
Samuel was born and raised in Cameroon. He grew up in a society where everyone believed in the existence of witchcraft. Every tragedy and evil was caused by a supernatural being. His childhood was marked by belief in witchcraft and its practices. After five years of studying film production abroad, he returned to his country, this time not to visit his family but to unveil the mysteries and secrets of witchcraft and his childhood nightmares. 
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.
