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Cultures-Vanuatu

Funeral Season

  • Saison des funérailles (La)
Genre : Social
Type : Documentary
Original title :
Principal country concerned : Column : Cinema/tv
Year of production : 2011
Format : Feature
Running time : 87 (in minutes)
http://www.der.org/films/funeral-season.html

“We pray to our ancestors but we do not worship them. You, you need an intermediary, the priest. But for us, our intermediary is the ancestor who is sitting next to God,” says Poundé, the old Cameroonian ethnologist, to the young Jewish director from Canada. And with this conclusive statement, everything becomes clear: the funerals in memory of “the dead who are not dead” organized several days or even years following the burial, the chants, brass bands and traditional dancers who accompany and punctuate the village rituals. The ancestral rites struggle to survive in a continuously westernized society of consumption by parading wealth and excess for all to see — even the dead.

Funeral Season takes the viewer through the red dust of Cameroon's laterite slopes and into the heart of the Bamileke country, where one funeral flows into the next. These death celebrations provide an opportunity to see elaborate costumes and masks, festive songs and dances, and lavish feasts, while illuminating the communal links which bind the Bamileke as an ethnic group and society. Along the way, the director befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors. At times, the dialogues alienate him from the locals; at other times they bring the two closer together. Like the dead and the living, they belong to two different worlds often mirroring each other.

There is a lightness to be found in this subjective ethnographic film which imaginatively and symbolically turns the gazes of two different worlds upon each other.

“A snapshot of our multicultural, inter-connected world.” (Liz Ferguson, Montreal Gazette)

“A highly personal and refreshingly humorous take on the often sober subjects of African film.” (Christopher Sykes, Montreal Mirror)

“A documentary in which ethnography is flipped on its head.” (Jury of Traces de Vies - Rencontres du Film Documentaire)

“Woody Allen in Cameroon… This extraordinary burial-road movie takes us into a world of ghost stories that we are only too happy to believe.” (Ethnocineca Documentary and Ethnographic Filmfest Vienna)

Canada - Cameroon / 2011 / Colour / 87 min / Dir.: Matthew Lancit

http://www.der.org/films/funeral-season.html

Summary for official catalogues

In this comedic ghost story a Canadian Jew finds himself in the midst of a culture where "the dead are not dead". Village by village, locals take him on a road trip through Cameroon's most joyous funeral celebrations. Along the way, he befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors.

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Saison des funérailles (La)

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  • Alliance Française VANUATU
  • PACIFIC ARTS ALLIANCE
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