Film recommendation:
(Link at the end of the post)
One of my favourite films is The Festival of the Chicken [Das Fest des Huhnes], an Austrian mockumentary from the 90s.
It's a parody of those anthropology documentary films that Europeans used to and still make about African and Asian societies.
"The Festival of the Chicken" is a classic trope reversal. According to its narrative, a Black, African team of anthropologists and filmmakers go to rural Europe – Upper Austria to be precise – to document the locals' society, life and culture.
In the same arrogant and condescending way that white filmmakers talk about, judge – and wildly misinterpret – societies in the equivalent documentaries about Africa, they 'analyse' Upper Austrian society.
For example, people going on a bicycle tour is filmed and interpreted from afar as a senseless and confusing nomadic ritual that implies a deep-rooted yearning for the Europeans' nomadic past. It's fundamentally representative of the Europeans' life, dictated by tradition and superstition more than reason.
A folk festival with tons of alcohol is portrayed as a massive, compulsory, primitive cult rite of self-harm and delusion, where even adolescents are senselessly forced into intoxication for twisted spiritual purposes. Concluding – of course – with the idea that perhaps such barbarian European traditions as beer feasts are the reason and an indicator as to their cultural inferiority and underdevelopment, and that they perhaps need humanitarian colonisation to teach them about manners and human rights.
It's satire with a bite – the point being that the actually serious documentaries that exist en masse about non-European cultures are racist nonsense, misinterpreting and overanalysing cultures they fundamentally don't even want to understand.
You can watch it with English subtitles here:
https://youtu.be/gy8poDqAhhg
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