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
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?
Marjorie is a descendent of Haitian immigrants living in Bahamas. All her life is faced with who she is, who has to be and what she feels by herself.
