"Linguists" the talk of the town at Sundance

[Kerim Friedman]

Here is the website for the film:

http://www.thelinguists.com/

kerim

On Feb 4, 2008 1:51 AM, Harold Schiffman <hfsclpp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Linguists" the talk of the town at Sundance
> Mon Jan 21, 2008 4:29am EST
>
>   By Kirk Honeycutt
>
> PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - Indiana Jones' spirit certainly
> infects the intrepid heroes of "The Linguists." These are bold
> academics who plunge into the jungles and backwater villages of the
> world to rescue living tongues about to go extinct. There are more
> than 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Yet we lose a language every
> two weeks thanks to colonialization, globalization and indifference.
> David Harrison and Gregory Anderson are scientists in a race against
> time. They trek deep into sometimes dangerous territories to record
> nearly dead languages, a thing that is at the heart of culture and
> knowledge. Clocking in at a little more than an hour,
> director-producers Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy S.
> Newberger's "Linguists" watches three of these fascinating and at
> times treacherous linguistic expeditions. The film should perform
> marvelously on television once it completes a festival run that begins
> at Sundance.
>
> In Siberia, the linguists search fruitlessly for speakers of the
> Chulym language only to discover their driver, who at first won't
> admit he speaks Chulym, is fluent. This speaks volumes of a tyrannical
> Soviet regime that tried to suppress much of native culture and
> languages. In the Indian state of Orissa, tribal children attend
> boarding schools where they learn Hindi and English. This is
> practical, of course, but a disaster for native languages. In Bolivia,
> the men seek the less than 100 speakers of Kallawaya language in the
> Andes, a language tied into the rituals and practices of medicine and
> not a language learned as a child. They also find themselves in a
> sticky situation when they botch an act of gift-giving.
>
> The film has a perhaps unintended subtext of cultural
> misunderstandings where well-meaning but sometimes impatient and naive
> Westerners confront ways of thinking and behaving totally antithetical
> to their own. For instance, when Harrison insists on spending a night
> in a remote Indian village where bandits lurk, he not only endangers
> himself but also embarrasses his disapproving middle-class Indian
> hosts. Yet guileless bravery and full-throttle enthusiasm see the
> linguists through these scrapes. Jumping from one expedition to
> another while throwing in an excursion to an American Indian
> reservation in Arizona causes the viewer to lose the thread of the
> individual quests. But this does help identify patterns in language
> disuse and subsequent extinction. The film certainly makes a
> compelling case for this particular kind of academic derring-do.
>
> Director-producers: Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, Jeremy S.
> Newberger; Writer: Daniel Miller; Director of photography: Seth
> Kramer, Jeremy S. Newberger; Music: Brian Hawlk; Editors: Seth Kramer,
> Anne Barliant.
>
> Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
>
> http://www.reuters.com/article/email/idUSN2135148520080121?sp=true
>
> **************************************
> N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
> its members
> and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
> or sponsor of
> the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
> disagree with a
> message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
> *******************************************
>
>