Ethnofest collaborates with the Athens International Film Festival!

Tuesday September 12th, 2017
News

The Athens Ethnographic Film Festival Ethnofest is happy to announce its collaboration with this year’s, 23rd edition of the Athens International Film Festival. The commencement of this collaboration will include the screening of the film “La Chase au Lion á l’ Arc” (Jean Rouch, 1967) at the Athens International Film Festival, a film of high importance, chosen by both parties. The film will be screened on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the renowned anthropologist and significant representative of ethnographic film, Jean Rouch.

Jean Rouch, who made a pivotal contribution to the evolution on the French New Wave movement and of cinéma vérité, is probably the most significant piece in the multidimensional mosaic of the Visual Anthropology field. His profound filmography, most of which is situated in Africa, broadened the boundaries of ethnographic documentaries while simultaneously setting the foundations for the creation of ethnofiction, which in turn blurred the limits between documentary and fiction, and reassessed the boundaries of the relationship between filmmaker/researcher and research field.

 

About the film:

Between 1957 and 1964, Jean Rouch follows the Songhay hunters from the Yatakala region of Niger, who are the only people allowed to kill a lion. During this time, the anthropologist chronicles the events of the hunt as they unfold, while the technique and magic of it all are intertwined. The filmmaker approaches his subjects with respect and great insight and expertly combines speech and image establishing a parity between them. At the end of the hunt, the men tell the children the story of gaway gawey, the great lion hunt; by this point Jean Rouch has delivered one of the greatest representatives of ethnographic film if not of film in general.

 

The screening will take place on Friday, September 22nd, at 19:00, at DANAOS 1 cinema. Konstantinos Aivaliotis will say a few words about the film and the work of Jean Rouch before the screening.

*The Athens International Film Festival will take place between the 20th September and 1st October 2017. You can find out more about the Festival here.