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
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.
