FUNERAL SEASON
Dir.: Matthew Lancit
2011 | 87 min
Canada
Shooting location: Cameroon
“We pray to our ancestors but we do not worship them. You, you need an intermediary, the priest. But for us, our intermediary is the ancestor who is sitting next to God,” says Poundé, the old Cameroonian ethnologist, to the young Jewish director from Canada. And with this conclusive statement, everything becomes clear: the funerals in memory of “the dead who are not dead” organized several days or even years following the burial, the chants, brass bands and traditional dancers who accompany and punctuate the village rituals. The ancestral rites struggle to survive in a continuously westernized society of consumption by parading wealth and excess for all to see — even the dead.
Funeral Season takes the viewer through the red dust of Cameroon's laterite slopes and into the heart of the Bamileke country, where one funeral flows into the next. These death celebrations provide an opportunity to see elaborate costumes and masks, festive songs and dances, and lavish feasts, while illuminating the communal links which bind the Bamileke as an ethnic group and society. Along the way, the director befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors. At times, the dialogues alienate him from the locals; at other times they bring the two closer together. Like the dead and the living, they belong to two different worlds often mirroring each other.
The film is screened in English and French with English and Latvian subtitles.
Matthew Lancit is an award winning Canadian director and producer currently based in Paris, France. His work has screened in museums, galleries, universities, and film festivals around the world. He is known for Funeral Season (2011), Death of a Gentleman (2006) and Flâneurs: Street Rambles (2016).