The RAI's film department acts as a contact point in the UK for information, networking and advice in visual anthropology, organises film screenings and lectures and provides a base for international visitors. In addition, it supplies a service based on the acquisition, hiring and sale of ethnographic films, videos and DVDs for educational and academic purposes. The RAI’s ethnographic film library is one of the world’s largest and most important. New titles are added on a continuing basis to both the sales and the archive reference holdings. All films submitted for inclusion are screened by the specialist Film Committee, guaranteeing a standard of excellence unparalleled elsewhere. In addition to the collection, the RAI organises a bi-annual International Festival of Ethnographic Film.
For more information visithttps://raifilm.org.uk/
The following is a selection of film trailers. The films are distributed by the RAI and form part of the RAI's ethnographic film collection. The trailers have been produced by organisations unassociated with the RAI.
Q2P
Director: Paromita Vohra
Release: 2006
Length: 55 mins
Location: India, Mumbai / Asia
Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It sifts through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets, watching who has to queue to pee. As the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, we begin to also see the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; we learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers, and some of those answers are questions – about gender, class, caste and most of all space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.
Pink Saris
Director Kim Longinotto
Release 2010
Length 100 mins
Format Colour / DVD / PAL / All region
Location India
Language Hindi (English Sub)
Pink saris are worn by the Gulabi Gang, a group of women vigilantes in Northern India. From the untouchable caste, they resist being condescended to as the lowest social class. They have a champion in the form of the formidable Sampat Pal, who takes up their cases of social injustice and domestic abuse - often perpetrated by their husbands' extended families, with whom they're forced to live.
Je ne suis pas moi-même
Director Alba Mora, Anna Santamaria
Release 2009
Length 50 mins
Location Cameroon & Brussels
Language English, French (English subtitles)
Prizes/Commendations Material Culture Film Prize 2009
Shot in Cameroon and Brussels, Je ne suis pas moi-même examines the complex network surrounding the international market of African antiquities, and the contradictions in a European art market hungry for new tribal objects. Where do the African masks come from? What journey do these masks make before their unveiling in the windows of the biggest galleries or art collections in Europe? Who determines the economic and aesthetic value of these objects now that colonialism is supposedly dead? And then there’s a continent called Africa, in need of economic resources and therefore willing to sell its cultural heritage or, if need be, to fake it. The authenticity of the objects becomes blurred when the people that once adored them start to sell them.
Discover Anthropology has a quick reference guide to some of the films which are included in the RAI's ethnographic film library. Take a look at the following PDFs for films on:
Anthropology of Performing Arts
The RAI's Education Outreach Department has worked alongside young filmmakers to make short films introducing social and biological anthropology, careers, and a variety of different subjects! You can watch these films on the RAI's YouTube Channel. Join our Discover Anthropology Facebook group to keep updated on events, activities and contests!