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 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?
