Films with: Castaing-Taylor, Lucien

In and out of Africa

"During the colonial period in the 1920's, European interest in collecting African art stimulated a transnational trade between Africa and the West. Today this multi-million dollar trade lies largely in the hands of Muslim merchants. This is a story about Gabai Baare, a merchant who brings 'wood' from West Africa to sell in the United States. It is a story about the meaning of art"--Opening credits.

DVD 11543

Leviathan

In this cinema verite work set entirely on a groundfish trawler out of New Bedford, Mass., the filmmakers have avoided the standard equipment of interviews, analysis and explanation. A product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, the film offers not information but immersion in wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony. The brutality of fishing, as opposed to its romance, is emphasized here. The experience is often unnerving and sometimes nauseating, because of the motions of the juddering, swaying hand-held camera and also because of the distended eyes, gasping mouths and mutilated flesh of the catch. Presented without dialogue, speech is drowned out by the roar of the elements and the screech and thump of engines and hydraulic winches.

DVD 9692

Sweetgrass

"[D]epicts the twilight of a defining chapter in the history of the American West - the dying world of Western herders, descendants of Scandinavian and northern European homesteaders. The film follows a group of modern-day cowboys as they lead an enormous flock of sheep on an arduous 150-mile up into Montana's breathtaking and often dangerous Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. A project that took nearly a decade to complete, this astonishingly beautiful documentary intimately captures a way of life that has been integral to the fabric of human existence since the dawn of history." -- Container.

DVD 7927