NAFA2020

NAFA2020

Related Content

• 40th edition of the NAFA International Ethnographic Film Festival takes place from 29 September to 2 October

Results

 

What did this initiative focus on?

The Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA), based in Norway, is a non-commercial, non-profit research and educational association working to promote ethnographic film and visual anthropology.

NAFA and the Visual Anthropology and Arts Laboratory (NAVA) of the Centre for Research Network in Anthropology (CRIA) organised, in Lisbon, between September 29^th and October 2^nd, 2021, the 40^th Edition of the NAFA International Ethnographic Film Festival. 

This event aimed to promote a platform and opportunities for reflection on major global issues in the field of cultural diversity, human rights, ecology and immaterial and material heritage.

The Festival took place at the National Museum of Ethnology, whose hosting was intended to be a way to cross views and reflections on the relationship of this institution with visual production and its archives. This initiative was organised in a context which recognises that anthropology and ethnographic film has, in the last two decades, aroused growing interest, particularly in Portugal, both by anthropologists, who use film as an alternative form of writing, and by filmmakers, who use the ethnographic method and anthropological themes as tools to explore and create the real.

This edition's programme included around twenty-four films from different parts of the world, recording the diversity of cultural practices that crosses our contemporary world.

Along with the official selection of the festival, workshops and conferences took place. It was in this context that the result of a partnership between Portuguese director Catarina Alves Costa and Norwegian director Frode Storaas was presented first-hand. This partnership resulted in the film Christmas Dinner (2021). From January to Easter, the cod move south of the Barents Sea to spawn on the Norwegian islands of northern Lofoten. Most of the catch, over 400,000 tonnes in 2020, is exported to Portugal. The film thus follows the cod from the Norwegian sea to the dinner table in Portugal.

In addition to mirroring the current production of cinema and anthropology, this festival was also an opportunity for the general public to come into contact with different looks and methods of recording and reflecting on the cultural, heritage, human and ecological diversity of the world in which we live.