In 1999, the construction for the laying of the first optical fibre cable in South east Asia is now crossing Cambodia from the Thai border to the frontier with Vietnam. The cable is to link up with another running from Europe along Silk Road. The worksite provides employment opportunities for many Cambodians. Peasants with no land, demobilized solders and families with no resources have thus been displaced to follow as the work as it advances.
In Madagascar, country of oral tradition, the history is told in poetry. And here also, the word is left to the storytellers so that they say the origin and the history of the island and his inhabitants, such as they were transmitted by the tales, the myths and the legends. Images of everyday life, habits family or traditional festivals illustrate the accounts of the Malagasy beliefs.
Must we really forget our ancestors in order to become modern?”
In a small village of Papua New Guinea, three exceptional men rival with each other, in the field of rituals and artistic creation, in order to win over their neighbours to their own philosophical view of the future. The stakes are high, and the question is in fact identical to that agitating our own societies: how to defend one’s identity while assimilating globalisation?
Through this film, they send a last letter to their dead, who have abandoned them, and who may now very well have emigrated in the rich country from which the white filmmakers come…
Indo Pino is a Taw-Waliya.
In the Wana language, the word “Taw” means “man”, “human being”. The word “Waliya” designates “beings of the forest”. This is how the Wanas call their shamen: the “Taw-Waliya”.
The Wana Wewaju who number about 1600, live in Indonesia, in the eastern part of Sulawesi (Celebes Island), among the dense equatorial rain forest of the Tokkala Mountains.
Indo Pino is a woman, one of most fascinating shaman that we have met.
We already made a first film with her: “From other Side of Night”. During our last visit (april 1999), Indo Pino is seriously ill. She is cured by others shaman which ask us to film these very old healing rituals. In the same time, we tried to cure her with medecine from Europa destined for our own use.
First, this film is the story of rituals which went with Indo Pino during her illness. Then, after her recovery, Indo Pino was explaining to us the impression of the rituals on her sick body.
At least, in her surprising conception of occidental medecine, she told us adapting it naturally to her own imaginatic system of the illness and human being.
Les Maitres Fous is about the ceremony of a religious sect, the Hauka, which was widespread in West Africa from the 1920s to the 1950s. Hauka participants were usually rural migrants from Niger who came to cities such as Accra in Ghana (then Gold Coast), where they found work as laborers in the city’s lumber yards as stevedores at the docks or in the mines. There were at least 30,000 practicing Hauka in Accra in 1954 when Jean Rouch was asked by a small group to film their annual ceremony. During this ritual, which took place on a farm a few hours from the city, the Hauka entered trance and were possessed by various spirits associated with the Western colonial powers: the governor-general, the engineer, the doctor’s wife, the wicked major, the corporal of the guard. The film is a critical commentary on the effects of colonialism in Africa