Astra Film

Sweet Sorghun

Director: Ivo Strecker, Jean Lydall  
Country: Germany
Year: 1994
Length: 31

Twenty years old Kaira Strecker, daughter  of anthropologists Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall, remembers her 1983 visit to the Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, where her parents carried out fieldwork for many years.
Sorghum plays a central role in Hamar economy and nutrition. Grinding and making various dishes out of Sorghum is a common activity.
Focusing on the topic of Sorghum, the staple food in Hamar, the film is, at the same time, an unusual reflection of anthropological fieldwork - not by the fieldworkers themselves, but their daughter.

Bury Me Twice

“River of borrowed life” is the description for earth in the sacred language of the Ngaju-Dayak. Earthly existence to them seems to be a troublesome stage of transition. Death consequently is not a tragic event for a dying person, but promises access to eternal life in the village of the dead in the upper world.
The bones of the deceased are put in an artistically decorated shrine specially made for bones. The entire cosmos: plants, animals and human beings are created new once again through reciting the myth of creation.
The film shows the different rituals that were executed on the occasion of a Tiwah ceremony in 1993. It lasted 38 days.

Between The Old and The New

The Masquerade Games Festival has a 30 years' history. It is held every third year and for the last 10 years it has become an international event. The Bulgarian popular calendar mentions several  local versions of the masquerade, which differ according to the season: winter games or spring games.
This film is about the winter masquerade games in Southwest Bulgaria. It has been shot between 27th and 29th January 1996, during the 11th International Folk Festival of Masks, Carnival and Customs PERNIK ’96.
Considering old male carnival performances as they appear today, the film attempts to touch the ancient nature of the custom, focusing not so much on its genesis, but rather on its dynamics.

The First Inhabitants of the Strouma River Basin

The archaeological finds of the last decade around the riverside of Strouma, today part of the History Museum of Kyustendil collections, shape the character and changes of pre-historical cultures there between the 7th and 5th millennium b.C. (Neolithic and Late Neolithic Ages).
The first inhabitants of the Strouma basin were farmers and stock-breeders. Their material culture and spiritual life reach us under the form of tools, pottery items, “prewriting” signs, religious objects, anthropomorphic  and zoomorphic figurines.
The film is one possible view into the “ruins” of the flourishing Neolithic and Late Neolithic cultures in the Strouma basin, which mark the supreme achievements of pre-historic societies in the Balkans and in Europe.

Beyond the Borders

The commentaries of a Japanese professor, in whose opinion aid cannot always be only one way. He feels that there must be reciprocity, even if it is not of a financial nature. Maybe this is one way to understand the phenomenon the film examines. For, just as Japan sends aid to Bangladesh, so Bangladesh sends emigrant workers to Japan. And more and more of those migrant workers are marrying Japanese women and either settling in Japan or bringing their wives home to Bangladesh. Following three couples, “Beyond the Borders” shows the special joys and difficulties of relationships constructed across very different cultures.

A Story of An Old Castle

In a canyon of Liangshan Nationality Autonomous Region, there is an old castle whose declining walls have witnessed, like an old person, the changes of history. It keeps together the 30 households of the Han and the Yi people. The hostile nature and the everyday problems of life require collaboration and solidarity among the inhabitants.  Generation after generation  have been farming herding and living here. What are these people’s ambitions and dreams like? This film wants to spy out the forgotten corners of life and tell a common yet  thrilling story.

Bontoc Eulogy

The film investigates Fuentes’ sense of displacement as a Filipino immigrant by documenting the story of Makod, an Igorot tribesman who is brought to the United States for the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. The film is appropriately described as an experimental documentary. It combines conventions of the non-fiction film with elements that call attention to and challenge the forms of traditional documentary practice. At the end of the film, Fuentes accepts the unfinished nature of his search, a testament to the quiet and forgotten stories of those who came before him.

Biafra: Fighting a War Without Guns

Between 1967 and 1970 the Ibo people, known as the Jews of Africa, fought a doomed struggle to secede from Nigeria and create a new state, Biafra. Biafra never had the weapons to win a military war, but with a single telex link to the outside world, it fought another war, a war in the airwaves and print media. With novelist Frederick Forsyth and Biafran leader, Colonel Ojokwu, this film tells the story of a pitiless civil war.

Jewish Item

A contemporary documentary about the British-Jewish 18-30 somethings who don’t fit into the mainstream of social/synagogue life.
The starting point was a recent controversial survey about the so-called “missing generation” which suggested that increasing numbers of young  Jews are leaving the fold, to the dismay of the religious establishment.  So we interviewed a diverse cross-section of “outsider Jews” who cut across class, race and gender boundaries.  Many of whom, like experimental  film-maker Sandra Lahire, lesbian performance artist Helena Goldwater and club queen  Philip Salon, live and breathe their Jewishness without ever needing to attend a Talmud Torah or a kibbutz club.
“Jewish Item” reflects strong opinions and is lively, challenging, funny and irreverent.
“Jewish Item” is a  dialogue of discontent and discovery.
A pointer to where the radical spirit of the ‘30s now lies.

An Only Voice

The film describes the situation of the Indians in the Northern region of Argentina. They struggle to get the restitution of their land, to complement their culture. It was for the first time that they accepted the “blancs” to film their discussion.

Beyond the Mountain

It is often said in the mountainous Northeast of Portugal “Bread and wine eases the way”.
For many centuries, the only cereal planted here was rye. The Celts who inhabited  the old  “castros” are thought to have grown it first.
July is the harvest month according to the local people.
After harvesting and once the sheaves are bound, it is time to thresh.
There are very few people left who still thresh cereal with a mallet or hammer. Mutual help is still to be found.
The mills are linked to the cultivation of rye. They are quite ancient constructions, usually used by the whole community.  Each family may use the mill for a certain number of hours.
The cycle of the rye comes to an end with the baking of bread. Women who bake it say very old traditional words they consider essential for a good bread baking.

Borders

There is a complex situation of geo-human isolation in Tras-os-Montes, a province in the Northeast of Portugal.
Will a second-hand railway bridge bought from the Portugal Railway Company only by 22 peasants with the help of European LEADER Program, save the old village of Chelas from an isolated existence between two rivers? The contrast between generations. A postponed dream. So identical ways of life and so different points of view about the bridge are given us by people who dream the way they die. Alone.

Story Maker, Story Taker

This is an attempt to bring together a selection of the stories and paintings of the Warlis and some of the writings about them.
To the Warlis, a community of Adivasis (indigenous peoples) who live close to Bombay, these stories represent their “history”, their world-view.  All the outsiders, the Portuguese,  the Marathas, the British, the “native” settlers... they all  tried to  obliterate their history and wisdom. The work of the outsiders who wrote about “the Warli” represents a process of creating new mythologies.
By bringing together these disparate discourses, this video aspires to critique these mythologies... To read between the lines, as the stories themselves do.

Forgotten Goddesses

Maria Gimbutas was born in Lithuania in 1921 and came to the USA as a refugee after the second World War. Working in American universities, she soon became a leading authority in European Bronze Age history.  She then combined her great knowledge about European linguistics, folklore, mythology and archaeology and started her great work about  religion in the European Stone Age.
When she presented her theories about a peaceful and womancentred civilisation where goddesses were worshipped, she created a storm of controversy.

“We Came Back”, the last part of the series “As Far As Máko From Jerusalem”, shows a meeting of orthodox Jews from all parts of the world in Máko to commemorate at their - or their parents’ - native town the 50th anniversary 1994 of the Holocaust and the death of the last Rabbi of Máko. This is not only an opportunity to meet old friends and exchange memories of the past. It also shows that Jewish life and tradition almost ceased to exist in Máko. How little has remained can be seen from the visit to the Jewish cemetery, the synagogue - which will be restored with financial support from the visitors - and the Rabbi’s former house.

The Fairy Island

A lyrical documentary shot on both banks of the River Danube in the districts of Szigetkoz and Csallokoz in Hungary and Slovakia.
Its main characters: a gold-washer, a story teller, fishermen, thatchers, a basket weaver and a feather-stripper, come from a handful of villages which for centuries formed an ecological whole - a land of a thousand islands. Their daily work and their legends have been shaped by the river.
There is no narrator. Flute, saxophone and percussion instruments complement the characters’ words as they go about their work.
Only late in the film do we discover that the final destruction of the region, foretold in the legend of Fairy Ilona, is coming true. A hydro-electric dam, “that Monster...” has been built in the heart of the region, and the river has been diverted  from its old bed. The Wind-Wizard’s book too is lost.
After decades of harm to the fragile ecosystem - the walling off creeks, the planting of Canadian poplars in place of the old willow and black poplar forests - the power station is the last straw.

Tierradentro. Home of Spirits, Land of People

Tierradentro is not simply San Andres of Pisimbala and the Hipogeos and statuary that has been found here. Tierradentro is 1,900 square kilometres  in the Cauca Department, where 45,000 natives and a black community live. In addition to the landscape from the snow-capped mountain of Huila, there are hot springs and salt mines scattered all over the region.

The Two-Wheel Dream

An entertaining documentary about the Finnish man and his love of his two-wheeled dream, the moped.

Return to Taiga

When Illume’s film crew was filming their series Taiga Nomads, we lived in the age of the communist Soviet Union. The series told of the nomadic reindeer herders Evenks’ life in the endless taiga in central Siberia. During the spring of 1994, the same film crew returned to the taiga to visit and see how much life in the taiga had changed.
“Return to Taiga” also marks the last film of anthropologist and film-maker Heimo Lappalainen.

Dog Trails

Lying on his deathbed, the Russian-Karelian Timo Lesonen says his life has been nothing but a dog trail, not a man’s life at all. His farm was destroyed in the 30’s, he worked as an interpreter in the Soviet Army as it tried to invade Finland in 1939, he was a prisoner of war of the Finnish Army and then a soldier in that same army in WW II.
After the war he spent ten years in a prison camp in  Petsora, the USSR. His wife suffered severe frostbite in a forest. He also had to face  his daughter’s bitter hatred towards him.
Tim Lesonen spent his latest years as a hermit in a small dirtfloor hut in the wilderness of the Finish-Russian border by the village of Venehjärvi - far from people, but close to nature that gave him his livelihood.

The Aracomorabeans

Plan d’Aou, a suburb of Marseilles, North District, swept by the wind, stowed to the hill, above the Mediterranean Sea.
Managers are completing the Great Urban Project. The district is going to change. Young people of the suburb, most of them Arabs or Comoreans, perform on stage their daily life, their fears and their hopes. They tell their uncertain future.

Roots Deep in the Stone

Dionysos comes from the sea. The mast of his boat is a vine-arbour like those rising out of the fresh cellars in the streets of baroque boroughs of the “Vale d’Itria”.
For two thousand years potters have been making the same jars for preserving wine in the “trullo” beside home-made olive oil, cheese and bacon.
In a forsaken estate, branches from a two hundred years old vine grow through tactful stone rings carved from the block.
In the “cantina” of Locorotondo, an EC funded palace of technology and marketing, an ecologist is searching for adjectives to qualify the limpidity, aroma and flavour of a white wine born from the red earth of the garden like “vignete”.

The Candle

The candle-making process at a monastery in Serbia. All the communities from the neighbourhood participate in the process. Each family collects  bee wax and donates it to the monastery for candle making. 

The Prayer

In the village Topolnitza in Eastern Serbia, a ritual  takes place every year on Saint Wednesday before Easter. Women come to the graveyard and light tree branches. It is a way to send light and warmth to the dead.

White Carnival at Kruscica

An ancient pagan custom meant to revive nature has been preserved under a new form and with a new significance.
Seven weeks before Orthodox Easter the Shrove-tide begins. The old customs still exist in a few Serbian villages in Banat.

Christmas for Horses

Until not very long ago there used to be a celebration on St. Tudor Day in the village  Veliki Izvor, famous for breeding pure-blood horses.
A lot of actions with magical purpose were performed for the horses’ health and fertility. The most important of them  was to walk the horses in a circle around a fire. The purpose of this ritual was to purify the animals, protect them against diseases and keep them fertile. The day would end with a horse race.

Extreme Lands

An insight report on the living conditions of the original population of Chukotka. Due to government policies most Chukotka natives who live on whale fishing and hunting have been moved to the countryside to be resettled  in squalid city housing where they have no chance to continue their traditional way of life.
Most children of the families  who do remain in the countryside are forcibly sent to boarding schools. There are efforts to teach them indigenous skills, but teaching is merely theoretical so that once  they return to their villages, children experience a break with their own culture.  Their main language has become Russian and they face difficulties in re-adjusting to their parents’ way of life.  Yet they maintain a yearning to find a balance between the old and the new and many of them try to find ways to reconcile with their cultural identity.

Sobre el Pampano Roto

Appearing from the mysterious past, in Guayadeque rises the memory of an embarrassing celebration: until today, the only  known phallic dance - let’s call it that way - on the Canary Islands. We are talking about the Pampano Roto, dance or game of the broken vine leaf.
The Pampano Roto, a celebration apparently exclusive of Guayadeque. Something still close, that elder people say they have heard about in their childhood  from  the elder who,  in their turn, had heard about it from their parents and grandparents.
Although there are several versions of the celebration,  the essence of it is the same. A  woman used to cover her private parts with yam leaves while men were trying to drill the leaves with their penises. It is said that the woman usually skilfully helped to drill the yam leaves with her finger the one she had chosen to be her husband.

Christmas-tide - Dreadful Nights

Festivities played an important role in the peasants’ life of the village of Vokhtoma. Christmas-tide that included a number of various ritual games remained  popular till the mid-twentieth century. This film depicts the oldest and most tenacious fragments of fortune-telling, round-dancing games and walking mummers’ masquerades that were arranged both indoors and outdoors. The participants dressed up as a bear, a crane, Satan, an old woman - “dirty mummers” and as “good, pure mummers” - a horse, a youth, a landlord.
The Northern winter landscapes, original and unembellished scenes of life, the  festive clothes of the villagers, costumes and disguises prepared with inextinguishable fantasy by the peasants, natural and open-hearted laughter, jokes, dances, chastushkas - all these give the film singularity and energise spectators for a whole year.

Utuniarsuak is an old (87) Inuit hunter who has lived through the transition of his people’s 4000 year old culture into a Western  equivalent - literally in his own lifetime. He had always been a part of his arctic world, physically dependent and emotionally attached; but the young peo­ple of his village no longer seem to have this need. This powerful and moving story shares with the viewer the insights of a humorous and contemplative old man who relates how his natural world always was - not only the centre of his existence - but also responsible for shaping who and what he actually is.

YCP 1997

Director: Antjali Monteiro, K.P. Jayasankar
Country: India
Year: 1997
Length: 44

Built between 1865 and 1876, Yerwada Central Prison (YCP) Pune is one of the oldest prisons in India, with over 2,500 inmates. In this film, six poets and artists of the YCP talk about their work and their lives. Through their poems and musings, the film explores the ways in which they creatively cope with the pain and stigma of incarceration, analysing themselves, the barriers raised by society between "us" and "them", between "normal" and "deviant".

Hundreds of people crowd at the gates of a film studio, to put their names on the audition list, hoping to get a part in a movie made by a famous Iranian director who uses non-professional actors. At first sight, "Cinema, Cinema" is a film about the making of a film. However, the viewer gradually discovers that some of the applicants are the main characters and learns what drives them so badly into filmmaking. A subtle analysis of Iranian society.

In the small fishing towns of Ghana, the photographer’s studio is the place to go. To get “snapped” - wearing the latest fashion or posing with a long lost friend. Carrying the tools of your trade. For “future remembrance”, to show  how that dress was so becoming, how durable the friendship, how you made your living.  So that everybody will remember you.

A colourful documentary about the strug­gle for survival of neighbourhood youth in Helsinki over a period of one year. In at­tempt to keep the youngsters in Vesala off the streets, Timi, a 30-year old gypsy, has founded a multicultural indoor bandy team. The main characters of the film, Krisse and Ville, both play in the team. Krisse’s and Ville’s families are joined together by friendship and a common life­style. Continuous clashes with the police, alienation from society and despair lock them into a path that is sure to lead no­where. The future seems to hold no promise for Krisse and Ville.

“Heart of the Country” is a documentary study about learning in Japan. It is the story of Shinichi Yasumoto, the extraordi­nary principal of a rural school in central Hokkaido, Japan who is driven by his vi­sion for learning and his passion for edu­cating the heart as well as the mind. Par­ents and elders of this once impoverished town embrace principal Yasumoto’s vi­sion, but not without wary glances back to the past as they strive to create a world that will offer their children wisdom, humanity and responsibility. “Heart of the Country” is the story of the families of Kanayama, a community bound together by love  for its children and tempered by its journey through the cultural upheaval of postwar Japan.

Gideon is a 23 year old Israeli, living in Jerusalem. Wisam, a palestinian also 23 lives in the West Bank in Betlehem. Gideon was a soldier in the Westbank while Wisam was active in the Palestinian uprising. At first sight, they match the me­dia stereotypes of the Israeli soldier and the palestinian rockthrower. However, in the course of the film we get to know them as human beings, not just as anonymous violent opponents. Gideon tells us about his years as a soldier, when he tried hard to do his duty without losing his human dig­nity. Now he has a job in a restaurant and thinks about leaving Israel and finding a safer place for his unborn children. Wisam was in the Intifadah. His story is about clashes with israeli soldiers, prison and torture. Now he is a tourist guide and in his spare time he goes to meetings where palestinians and Israelis discuss about the conflict. "Faces of Conflict" is a strong and nuanced double-portrait counter­pointing the newsmedia stereotypes.

This is a personal film about Dundiwuy Wanambi over the years that Ian Dunlop has known and worked with him. It is made up mainly of interviews filmed with Dundiwuy Wanambi at Yirrkala and at his Marrakulu clan  centre at Gurka’wuy be­tween 1970 and 1982. It reveals something of the struggles of one man in the face of the huge changes brought about by the coming of the Nabalco bauxite mine and the mining town of Nhulunbuy to the Gove Peninsula.

On June 3rd 1992, six months after Eddie "Koiki" Mabo's tragic death, the High Court upheld his claim that Murray Island­ers held native title to land in the Torres Strait. The legal fiction that Australia was empty when first occupied by white people had been laid to rest. The film tells the pri­vate and public stories of a man so pas­sionate about family and home that he fought an entire nation and its legal sys­tem. Though his greatest victory was won only after his death, it has forever ensured his place on Murray Island and in Austra­lian history.

The Awara Soup  is a kind of stew containing all sorts of ingredients coming from the different cultures of Guyanese society. If you eat that dish on Easter, you are sure never to leave Guyana, they say.  Using the cooking of this dish as a starting point, the film explores the different realities composing this French overseas region. American Indians, Europeans, Slave descendents, Laotians, Chinese, Brazilians, Surinamese, tell us how they’re bringing new flavours to the Guyanese stew of identities.

The film approaches questions of religious and ethnic identity through the subject of the motorcycle taxi riders of Calabar, Nigeria. The far from mundane experience of a taxi ride provides a focus around which daily encounters with danger, risk-taking and the search for spiritual “protection” can be explored.

The documentary “Madame E” paints an intimate and funny portrait of Eila Lemmela, also known as the Finnish eccentric Madame E.  She is the colourful wife of a pig farmer and at the same time a passionate art collector. She feels equally at home among her pigs as on the parish council, she likes to sit for painters and sketchers and attend openings of art exhibitions. Eila’s life revolves round art: artistic baking, artistic Christmas trees, artistic hats. Her life is full of surprises and may take her from the piggery where she watches over the newborn piglets straight to a poetry evening or a party at an art gallery. And yet, life would not be complete without a glimpse of its tragic side.

Lucy Castle, a young English woman came to the village Hoteni in Maramureş, in the north of Romania to do research for her PhD in ethnomusicology. There she ended up getting married to a local four years younger than herself with a rather poor education, Ion Hotea. People in the village are disappointed by Lucy's choice. They say Ion is a violent guy who drinks too much. Lucy was planning to settle down in her husband's village. Yet, the Castle-Hoteas are now in England. People in the village say Ion had had that in mind from the very beginning.  

Throughout the centuries, some peoples have considered themselves superiour to others. They founded their belief on military power, religion and threat. The first attempts to classify human races scientifically were made only 200 years ago. But interpretations based on the con­cept of the survival of the fittest made some races look less fit than others, thus offering the justification to some to dispose of the "inferiour" human beings. The exhibition "Related Though Different" has been opened in the former "Rassensaal" of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. The visitors are invited to discover why and in what way the 5.5 billion people of the planet are related to each other, in spite of all differences. The film highlights the contrast between this concept and the mistakes made by research in the past.

One night in 1940 in the village of Ip in Transylvania, the Hungarian army killed 157 local Romanians in a retaliatory action. Since the 70ies, the anniversary of the mass murder has gained greater importance. The question is whether in the course of history the traditional coexistence of the Romanian and the Hungarian communities in this village can ever be restored.

Ica, Laci, Pisti and Miklos live in a garden suburb of Budapest. They are homeless. They eat, they work, they have fun and sometimes they cry. They are, in short, alive! The camera follows them for eight months and documents their daily routine as well as some dramatic moments which bring changes in their lives.

Much has been written and shown about Palestinians and Israelis. Yet, one part has been left out by media, as well as by anthropology, the Palestinian minority in Israel. Over 900,000 Palestin­ian-Arabs live in Israel as citizens of the Jewish State. This film throws light on their situation. The story is told by Samiyeh, a 20 years old Palestinian and her cousin Nidal. Like all young people in the Arab world, which has been bombarded by Western ideals and values, they have their own hopes and frustrations, sweet dreams and nightmares. However, the Is­raeli government intrudes into the minutest details of their lives. The Palestini­ans are prospering in Israel along with the rest of the society. But “money is not everything” as Samiyeh’s father puts it; money comes and goes. But “if al karamah (human dignity) goes, it can never come back”.

Povilas Jurkstas is an amateur ethnographer. He is an old man, living alone surrounded by piles of things he has collected in a lifetime. He is waiting for tomorrow,  the day when he hopes everything is meaningful.

The film focuses on life in the homestead of Baldambe, a Hamar elder in Southwest Ethiopia, who comments on the intricacies of herding goats, the division of labour and the moral obligations obtaining between the members of his family. The second part of the film deals with sacrifice and the ancient art of reading the entrails which are used in Hamar to cope with the physical and social threats of illness.

Starting from a family drama, the film explores the collision of two entirely different worlds. One of them is conservative and traditional, the other flexible and adaptive. Father and Son. Shaman and Businessman. They both belong to a disappearing Siberian nation, the Khantys. The son works for a Russian oil company, which pumps millions of barrels of oil out of the Khantys' ancestral land. His job is to coerce his own people into selling their lands to the Russians. Shaman resists armed with his drum and bearhead. The Prodigal Son has two faces. Under the pressure of the consumer society, Torum, the most important Khanty God, has also become double-faced.

A film about the Gaddis, a transhumant tribe of shepherds who live in the Himalayas. Their life is a continuous journey shaped by the change of seasons. The film captures this rhythm exploring Movement and Rest, Journey and Home, Meetings and Separations.Gods and Goddesses, rituals, songs, festivals and legends emerge as they move their flocks over snow-covered mountains. Their stories are wry, humorous, sad or bitter comments on a society who tries to make them give up their traditional life-style, offering very little in return.

In Macedonia, former Yugoslavia, two Sheiks squabble for power in a Dervish brotherhood. In this fragile, unsteady soci­ety, far from God and traditional Sufism, their petty quarrel focusses on the issue of which group will pierce themselves at the Nervuz ceremony.  Through the rivalry between  these two characters who corre­spond to opposing archetypes of religious leaders, the documentary offers a living glimpse of  spiritual experience at popular level, which, despite the humorous situa­tions and extraordinary images, may shock our sensitivity. The Dervishes practice a form of Islamic yoga consisting of rhyth­mic movements, repetitive chants and controlled breathing. During the cere­mony, the Dervishes pierce their face, neck or limbs with nails and spikes. In their state of trance no blood flows. But the mystical market-place is over-crowded. Each Sheik attempts to attract the greatest number of faithfuls and thus diminish the importance of his rival.

Somewhere in the desert between Mad Max and Woodstock a steadily increasing community creates a temporary autono­mous zone for a new millenium; a daring community experiment, a bizzare perform­ance, a vivid incarnation of the Internet, cyberspace in wasteland. Burning Man 2020 takes the viewer on a tour de force from San Francisco to the Black Rock De­sert, Nevada, where shameless rapture and stimulant overdose, creatively ignited, burst up in flames.

The film is the story of the Kagai-ool family from Tuva. Tuva lies in Central Asia, in Siberia, not far from the Mongolian border. Mama and Papa Kagai-ool live alone in a yurt, moving from the steppe  to the forest and back several times a year. They have one horse, some sheep, goats and cattle. The entire Kagai-ool family depends on them in the coming winter. Their son Alexei is a stone carver and  lives in the city of Kyzyl but many things keep him tied to his home village. He is the modern nomad. The city life does not prevent him from hearing the voices of the spirits who live in the stones he carves. The Kagai-ools are "in the arms of Buddha and the drum". Buddhism and shamanism have survived here in spite of  the attempts of the communists to destroy people's traditions and old beliefs. Buddha and the shaman are always present,  even if the modern world has sometimes penetrated the traditional life style.  

Ancient Russian chronicles mention a glo­rious tribe, the Kumandinians, who fought against the Slav princes. Today, a small community of no more than 1,000 people live in the Altai Republic. They are the descendants of the famous warriors. Svet­lana and Vladimir are Kumandinians. She is a historian, he is a driver. According to Christian kinship, they are cousins, but in the Kumandinian tradition he is her uncle. They have both left their native village, but are strongly tied to the Kumandinian heritage. Coming back home means the happiness of meeting their mothers, the sadness of having lost someone dear and nostalgia for their childhood. In the vil­lage of Sankinail, the kumandinians try to survive as a distinct community. Will there be any Kumandinians in the future? Svet­lana and Vladimir's return to their roots is trying to give an answer.

The Yukhagirs are one of the small indigenous peoples of Northern Siberia. The film-maker went to the village of Nelemnoye to explore what it means to be a Yukhagir.

Under socialist conditions of full-employ­ment, the poorly educated Roma enjoyed a modest degree of well-being. During the present transition period, the vast majority of the Roma have lost their jobs and many have fallen into extreme poverty. In this context of discrimination and despair, evangelism seems to be a ray of hope. During the month of June 1997, a visual anthropology workshop took place in the town of Sliven, Bulgaria. The initial goal of the project was to train  a small number of young Roma into anthropological video techniques. Following the training period the each of the Roma students made a video exercise on a topic at their own choice. The workshop  aimed to help the young Roma address a wide audience and tell their stories about life in their marginal community. It was further expected that native video recorders would express in their work a much higher degree of sensi­tivity to cultural meaning than an outsider could do.

Saint George is one of the greatest holi­days for the Gypsies living in the town of Kyustendil. Based on the stories told by the elders and with the help of young "in­tellectuals" the community is trying to re­store the forgotten tradition. Everyday life is hard for them, but during the celebration the rapture and happiness particular to the Gypsy spirit will prevail.

Vido Bagur is a Croatian folklorist and ethnographer. He has done field research in Dalmatian towns and villages for decades, studying traditional songs, dances and customs. During the past few years, he was involved in a programme proposed by the communities themselves: the revitalisation in situ of disappearing customs. The film is about one of the projects, the carnival of the white masks in the village of Putnikovici, in a peninsula in south Dalmatia. To bring forgotten customs back to life is a delicate and responsible process. The basic question the film raises is how truthful such a process can be. The genuine desire of the community to get their cultural identity back is one possible answer.

The village of Jezera is on the Murter Island in northern Dalmatia. Everything about this village is connected to the sea: its history, the folklore and people's thoughts. Almost all the local songs are about the sea and the loved ones who are out there in their boats. On the shore, women take care of the light-house, so that their men can find the way back home.

A Venezuelan harp player, a violinist from Sarajevo, an Argentinean piano player, a Malayan singer and a Romanian zither player are the miscellaneous leading char­acters in this documentary. Although the film is called “The Underground Orches­tra” and initially seems to deal with people who make a living by playing music in the passages of the Parisian subway, the scene of the action gradually shifts to the life above-ground. On the one hand, because shooting a film in the Parisian subway is forbidden since a series of bomb attacks occurred there. On the other hand, an “underground” world also seems  to exist at the surface: many of the musicians who are portrayed have left their native coun­tries for political reasons and  are currently living in France as illegal aliens. Their dwellings are tiny “chambres de bonne” under the roofs of Parisian houses, or overpriced but shabby hotel rooms. Little by little, their musical activities are streamlined. They can be found in record­ing studios and concert halls. They have also joined forces in a real “underground orchestra”, that plays underneath the ar­cades near the Place des Vosges.