Coming back in September 2012!
Second Sunday Culture Films
Peripheries • In concert with the Penn Humanities Forum we are pleased to present a series of culture documentaries with the theme of people marginal to the societies in which they live.
All programs are free with Museum admission donation.
Penn Museum announces a new occasional series: Live from the Archives!
We are pleased to present our collaborations with filmmakers in re-working archival materials of the Penn Museum in this documentary film series.
Keep your eyes open for the following screenings:
From the 1930s to the early 1970s, the Chinese in Jamaica owned many small grocery stores all over the island. They were an insular group and mostly kept to themselves, at the same time considering themselves true Jamaicans. The documentary “The Chiney Shop” (2012, Jeanette Kong, Canada) explores the ways in which the Chinese shopkeepers contributed to and intersected with Jamaican society. More information about The Chiney Shop [US premier this FALL 2012]
Gods and Kings, (2012, Namshub Films) is a film about contemporary Maya people in the town of Momostenango, Guatemala, who are using Hollywood and other north American pop culture images in their traditional costumed festivals, it creatively uses Penn Museum footage from the J. Alden Mason Collection. We will be one of the very first venues for this film in Fall 2012 in connection with the Maya 2012 exhibit.
- Maren Elwood’s film, Stone and People is about the tension between land rights of current day Inca people and archaeological field work and antiquities preservation. The particular Kate and Arthur Tode collection film reel from Peru that Maren culled from was preserved in a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007, the first of four that we have received for our film collections. It is gratifying to learn that we selected to preserve a film that turns out to have relevance to a large audience in Peru, and will be reborn in a new context some eighty years later. (Imagine Kate and Arthur’s amazement to see that they are heavily featured in a new film!) We expect to present this film in late 2012.
- The latest collaboration with a filmmaker involves a Fulbright project in India about Victorian era European female travelers, which she will contrast with current day internet consumption (virtual travel) by South Asian teen girls. The filmmaker, Courtney Stephens, currently researching in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), will be working with the Dixon and Tode collections for this film. which is titled Venus Peregrine. No date has been yet set for this screening, since it is still in production, but likely it will be in Spring 2013.
