Films with: Thomson, Kelly

American denial

"In 1938, Swedish researcher and Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal plunges into America's Jim Crow South. His resulting study, An American dilemma (1944), poses a profoundly unsettling question: How can a people devoted to the American creed of equality, justice and opportunity for all continue to erect obstacles to those ends based on race? Through Myrdal's story and contemporary racial dynamics, the film explores how denial, cognitive dissonance, and implicit bias persist and shape all of our lives"--From container.

DVD 10921

Savage memory

In 1915, Bronislaw Malinowski set out to document the 'exotic' practices of a small group of islanders off the coast of Papua New Guinea. With extensive data on sex, magic and spirits of the dead, his work set the stage for anthropologists for decades to come and brought him fame as one of the founding fathers of anthropology. Four generations and almost one hundred years later, his great grandson travels to the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea and looks at the very controversial legacy Malinowski left behind - within the field of anthropology, within his own family and among the descendants of the people he studied. The film follows a layered landscape of narrative threads: the story of Malinowski's last surviving daughter and her ambivalence towards her father's painful legacy; the Trobriand Islanders surprising personal relationship to Malinwoski as they witness the impact of westernization on their changing customs; and the story of Malinowski himself- the triumphant, self-made mythical anthropologist.

DVD 9331