ELA co-presents two fantastic films this year at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History. Catch them both this Saturday!
Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues
2015 | 15 minutes | U.S.A.
Director in Attendance
Both a celebration of the world’s languages and a call to action to preserve global linguistic diversity, Khonsay is a unique document: a motion poem written in 50 endangered languages, from Yiddish to Nuer (South Sudan) and Adnyamathanha (Australia). Compiled by the poet and activist Bob Holman, who calls it “a cento in film,” the work is tour de force of poetic styles and cinematic techniques, and its effect is at once delightful, melancholic, and mesmerizing.
https://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-mead-film-festival/films/khonsay-poem-of-many-tongues
Bering. Balance and Resistance (Bering. Equilibrio y Resistencia)
2013 | 84 minutes | Mexico, U.S.A.
New York Premiere
Straddling the International Date Line, the fabled Bering Strait, and the border between the United States and Russia are the Little and Big Diomede Islands. These remote outposts are home to a small Inuit community that has traversed these borders for years, for trade, hunting, and festivals. In Bering. Balance and Resistance, Lourdes Grobet, one of Mexico’s most renowned photographers, takes a lyrical approach to the subject matter, closely following the day-to-day lives of the residents of Little Diomede (U.S.A.) as they balance a modern lifestyle with the preservation of ancient customs and language. Slow-moving, wide-angle cinematography makes for an immersive viewing experience of the punishing Arc
