Ethnographic film debuts at Museum of the North

March 17, 2016

A new ethnographic documentary film co-produced by the University of Alaska Museum of the North premieres in Alaska this month. “Changa Revisited,” the story of an indigenous Maasai family, will be shown Friday, March 25, in the museum auditorium as part of the UAF Midnight Sun Visiting Writers Series.

Leonard Kamerling, curator of the Alaska Center for Documentary Film at the museum, said he was drawn to this story because it strongly resonated with his experiences making films with Alaska Native communities.

“I’ve come to think of many of the forces fueling change in Alaska as global in nature," he said. "The loss of traditional livelihoods, competition over resources, land rights and effects of climate change are all forces that similarly affect the lives of indigenous people around the world.”

“Changa Revisited” is set in a physical landscape that is very different from that of Alaska. Kamerling said the film is not about the place, but rather the emotional landscape of people’s lives and how an indigenous family comes together to navigate a rapidly changing world.

“In this sense, I think Alaskans will feel a strong sense of recognition and identification. Hopefully, audiences will not see an exotic family in a strange environment, but rather reflections of their own lives, parts of themselves,” he said.

Kamerling produced the film with Peter Biella, the director of the Program in Visual Anthropology at San Francisco State University. Together, they had already developed a series of health intervention videos called trigger films. These short films with incomplete story arcs are presented in facilitated screenings so that the audience can come up with ways to complete the stories and at the same time provide possible outcomes for dealing with their own pressing health and social issues.

“We completed a series of six trigger films in East Africa in the Maasai language that focused on HIV and AIDS and tested them in rural communities,” Kamerling said. “These trigger films became a powerful way for communities to use video for self-actualization.”

“Changa Revisited” is the story of elder Toreto ole Koisenge, whose dreams about the future depended on his wealth in cattle. In 1980, he had over six hundred head. By 2010, disease had reduce the herd to twenty. The film addresses one family’s struggle to adapt to a world transformed by the loss of their traditional livelihood.

The film draws on a collection of more than 6,000 black and white photographs and hundreds of audio recordings of Maasai life taken in 1980 by Biella for his dissertation research. These images, woven with contemporary video footage, create a deeply personal portrait of a family’s journey through three decades of tumultuous change.

Biella has made films in the U.S., Egypt, Costa Rica, Peru, Romania and Haiti. His recent film, “The Lion and the Chairman,” took first prize at the EthnoFilm Festival in Croatia in 2013.

Kamerling has produced numerous award-winning films about Alaska Native cultures including “Uksuum Cauyai: The Drums of Winter,” which was named to the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress in 2006.

“Changa Revisited” was completed last month. It has been shown at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s International Ethnographic Film Festival in California and now in Alaska. In the coming year, it will be screened at international film festivals around the world.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Leonard Kamerling, film curator, at 907-474-7437 or via email at ljkamerling@alaska.edu

ON THE WEB: www.uaf.edu/museum/collections/docfilm