Keep the Dance Alive
Directed by Rina Sherman
2007, 75 minutes
Keep the Dance Alive will be shown at the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on November 11, 2007 and will be followed by a discussion with Director, Rina Sherman.
The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is the longest-running showcase for international documentaries in the United States, encompassing a broad spectrum of work, from indigenous community media to experimental nonfiction.
About the Film
As part of an ethnographic study, filmmaker Rina Sherman, a protégé of Jean Rouch, lived with the Ovahimba people of northwest Namibia for seven years, documenting the flow of ordinary life. This film shows how music, dance, and spirit possession are integrated into their everyday life—from birth to death.
Director’s Statement
This film forms part of a collection of films of The Ovahimba Years project, a long-term multidisciplinary ethnographic study of the Ovahimba and other Otjiherero language speaking peoples of northwestern Namibia and southwestern Angola. Filmed over a period of seven years during director Rina Sherman’s stay with an Omuhimba family, the film shows unique footage of how music, dance, and spirit possession are integrated into everyday life from infancy to death and thereafter.
Over the years, Rina Sherman became so familiar with the people she filmed and photographed that her presence as filmmaker and photographer came to be considered as an integral part of daily and ritual life.
Keep the Dance Alive, the fourth film to be completed in The Ovahimba Years Collection, presents a singular vision of the Ovahimba people, that of a filmmaker who shared the lives of the people she filmed for seven years, showing them over that period as they evolve in different situations.
“It is an experience second to none, a rare privilege to have shared the lives of the people of Etanga for so many years. I would not forfeit it for anything else. It has however transformed my spirit forever and a day,” says director Rina Sherman upon her return to Paris.
Rina Sherman
Paris, May 13, 2007
Director’s Bio
Rina Sherman was born in South-Africa. She went into exile and settled in France where she has been living and working since.
In 1990, she successfully completed a doctorate at the Sorbonne supervised by Jean Rouch.
In 1997, Rina Sherman was awarded a Lavoisier Research Bursary by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the project The Ovahimba Years, a multimedia long-term research program (drawings, oral tradition, video, film, and photography) aimed at creating a living trace of Ovahimba cultural heritage.
For a period of seven years, Rina Sherman documented, in a variety of media, various aspects of the daily and ritual lives of the Ovahimba. In 2003, she extended her research into southwestern Angola, and has covered the entire Otjiherero socio-linguistic cultural heritage landscape. She is currently writing and editing films about her seven years with the Ovahimba.
Click here to read an interview with Rina Sherman, Director of Keep the Dance Alive