Flaherty Film Seminar Student-Curated Screenings:Tellurian Drama (2020) & Foragers (2022)

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

6pm

VCAM Screening Room 

Haverford College

Organized by Audrey Hinsdale ’25 and Purnima Palawat ’24

Join us for an evening of films programmed by Audrey Hinsdale ’25 and Purnima Palawat ’24, student attendees at this past summer’s Flaherty Film Seminar at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya, Thailand:

Foragers, Jumana Manna, 2022, 65 minutes

Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

Tellurian Drama, Riar Rizaldi, 2020, 26 minutes

May 5th, 1923. The Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of a new radio station in West Java. It was called Radio Malabar. In March 2020, the local Indonesian government plans to reactivate the station as a historical site and tourist attraction. Tellurian Drama imagines what would have happened in between: the vital role of mountain in history; colonial ruins as an apparatus for geoengineering technology; and the invisible power of indigenous ancestral. Narrated based on the forgotten text written by a prominent pseudo-anthropologist Drs. Munarwan, Tellurian Drama problematizes the notion of decolonisation, geocentric technology, and historicity of communication.

The Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities supports faculty, staff, and students to attend the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the longest continuously running documentary film event in North America. Named after Robert Flaherty, considered by many to be the father of documentary film, the week-long seminar brings together over 160 filmmakers, artists, curators, scholars, students, and film enthusiasts to celebrate the power of the moving image. Held in the past at Colgate University and Skidmore College, the Flaherty Film Seminar moved to the Thai Film Archive in Salaya, Thailand, for its 2024 iteration. 

2024 Theme: To Commune

Programmed by May Adadol Ingawanij & Julian Ross

Supported by the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Visual Studies, VCAM, and Office of the Provost's Ethics Initiative.