Phantom Foreign Vienna
LISL PONGER (AUSTRIA 2004, 35MM, 27:00 MIN)
Almost every country, every culture, every ethnicity is represented in a large Middle European city such as Vienna, and has its own forms and conventions for preserving its identity. People meet each other in congress centers and backrooms, in restaurants and places of worship. In the years 1991 and 1992 Lisl Ponger undertook a systematic search for her book Fremdes Wien (Foreign Vienna). She kept a diary of her encounters. Eleven years later she edited a film out of her film and audio recordings.

Rouch in Reverse
MANTHIA DIAWARA (UK/USA 1995, VIDEO, 52:00 MIN)
This film is the first film to look at European anthropology from an African perspective. Malian filmmaker and New York University professor, Manthia Diawara’s film critiques visual anthropology through the work of Jean Rouch, perhaps the most distinguished ethnographic filmmaker living today. A cross-section of African intellectuals living in Paris discuss the difficulty of developing identities, simultaneously African and modern, in a society which persists in seeing them as ‘primitive’. Rouch in Reverse enters into a vigorous intertextual dialogue with 20th century ethnography to decenter these familiar images so contemporary Africans can create their own version of the past and the present.