The Chairman and the Lion
Directed by Peter Biella Produced by Kelly Askew, Frank Ikoyo, Juma Muriga and Howard Stein
The Maasai leader of a Tanzanian village battles many lions, both real and figurative, that threaten his community—‘bush’ lawyers, land grabbers, marauding beasts-of-prey, migration, and lack of education. Chairman Frank Ikoyo provides a glimpse into the current world of Ilparakuyo Maasai and the ever-increasing challenges they face. He advocates education as a key to village selfdetermination, despite the fact that it can produce “educated criminals.” The film depicts Ikoyo’s duties as Chairman—persuading women to send their daughters to school, interrogating spies in a lawsuit, and eliciting help from a renowned elder to train young warriors in the art of lion hunting.
Kelly Askew is Director of the African Studies Center and Associate Professor of Anthropology and DAAS. She has worked for over two decades in Tanzania and Kenya. Her writings and film projects span two primary research areas: poetic arts as vehicles for populist engagement with politics, and the formalization of property rights. Recent film projects include: (1) Poetry in Motion: 100 Years of Zanzibar’s Nadi Ikhwan Safaa (Buda Musique, forthcoming 2015) on Zanzibar’s oldest taarab orchestra; and (2) The Chairman and the Lions (Documentary Educational Resources, 2013), which won 1st place at the ETNOFilm Festival (Croatia, 2013) and a Special Jury Award at the Zanzibar International Film Festival (Tanzania, 2013). She is currently in post-production on a new film entitled Maasai Remix about indigenous creativity in addressing challenges to Maasai pastoralist livelihoods.
Alaina Lemon is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist who works in Russia and the Former Soviet Union. Her theoretical concerns lie mainly with ways to understand struggles over aesthetic techniques and communicative forms in relation to struggles over political change and social hierarchies. She has conducted research in theaters, film sets, government bureaus, street markets, and kitchens, as well as in archives and with media. Methodologically, Lemon’s ethnographic writing situates interactions in field contexts within broader social contexts, and connects them to trajectories of longer duree. Through the Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES), she works closely with colleagues across disciplines such as History, Literary Criticism, Slavic Studies, and Sociology. Her current project investigates ways that claims about trust and intuition both presuppose and produce social hierarchies.
T’an bakhtale: good fortune for you / produced and directed by Alaina Lemon and Midori Nakamura
http://search.alexanderstreet.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/view/work/763873
Yasmin Moll is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Her current book project, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo with Islamic television preachers, producers, and viewers, focuses on the intersections of religion, media, and revolutionary change in Egypt. She has published widely on questions of mediation and cultural politics in contemporary Muslim contexts. Her debut ethnographic film Fashioning Faith (2009, 22 min) was produced through NYU’s Culture and Media Program and is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources. It looks at the emerging world of Islamic fashion in the US and the young Muslim women designers who make it possible to think about questions of religious ethics, embodiment, and identity. During the uprising in Egypt, Yasmin made an online video highlighting the participation of women in Tahrir Square (The Women of Tahrir, 2011, 3 min) that won the Jury Award at the 2011 Three Minute Media Social Issue Film Festival and Best Video in the 2011 Common Ground 1001 Stories competition. This summer, Yasmin will begin shooting in Egypt for her new ethnographic film project on Nubian cultural activism.
https://vimeo.com/17031582
http://www.der.org/films/fashioning-faith.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIDXPHp4USI
