In My Mother’s House

Prof Lina M. Fruzzetti and Prof Ákos Östör

One day Lina Fruzzetti receives a photograph by e-mail from Italy with the caption “if this is your father, we are cousins.”
There follows a decade-long quest to learn more about her mother in Eritrea who does not dwell on the past and her father who died young in Italian-Eritrea. But above all, to understand her far-flung African, European, American family against the backdrop of colonial rule, worlds at war, migration, Diasporas, and the global world we all live in today.

Filmed in Italy, Eritrea, and the United States, in Italian, Arabic, Tigrinya with English subtitles, the film alternates between intimate conversations, participants' daily lives, and the wider historical and social settings in which the events take place.

The directors are university-based filmmaker-ethnographers,
(Brown and Wesleyan in the USA). They authored numerous distinguished films and publications. They collaborate closely with participants in their films and often with other filmmakers. Their films are visually interpretive, respecting the integrity of the culture and the locality. They use narration or not, subtitles, voice over, and inter-titles, or no words at all, just as a particular film demands it.
This is their first, deeply personal film.
Their previous films in India and Tanzania concern individual lives in small communities, in contexts ranging from sacred rituals and festivals in a town, to women scroll painters and singers in village West Bengal; from fish markets in Dar es Salaam, to a handicapped people’s cooperative in Zanzibar.
All were shown at festival around the world and won numerous awards.
Their written work is independent yet related to the films. They also participated in creating museum exhibitions and catalogues (Helsinki, Lisbon, Geneva) as well as websites around their work.

About the directors

Lina Fruzzetti joined the Anthropology Department at Brown University in 1975. She holds several national and international appointments and has taught at the Universities of Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, University of Helsinki, ISCTE (Lisbon), and IIT Gandinagar (Ahmedabad, India.) She directs the South Asia Studies undergraduate major. She is serving (or has served) on numerous university governance committees, and national committees: Fulbright, ACLS, Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Her primary focus in social anthropology is kinship, ritual and the construction of gender; race and ethnic relations, as well as ethnographic film. She conducts research in two world regions, India and North East Africa. Building on earlier work, she now addresses recent structural changes in the institution of marriage and the constitution of personhood. The result is a comparative, cultural approach that considers Indian feminist movements, and the problems and politics of identity and citizenship in the context of Islam and Hinduism in India. The underlying issue is the identity of the woman-citizen, feminism and nationalism in post-colonial studies. Five years of research that resulted in a new book on feminism, nationalism and the post-colonial question of religious identity and citizenship in India.
Recently she completed a 10-year ethnographic film project with the release of
“In My Mother’s House.” The 82-minute fim is a complex, layered study, built around her mother’s life and family in the USA, Italy and Eritrea. The dramatic, personal story reflects on the fate of new nations and globalization, the construct of the person in nationalist and post-colonial debates in America, Africa, and Europe. Research and filming were supported by the Carnegie Corporation, Brown and Wesleyan Universities.

Ákos Östör is among other things, an anthropologist and a filmmaker.
Educated in Hungary, Australia, and the USA, he carried out fieldwork and documentary filming in India (West Bengal and Varanasi), Sudan, Tanzania, Italy and Eritrea. He taught at universities in the USA, Portugal, Sudan, India and Tanzania, and was a fellow at research institutes in Hungary, Australia, India and the USA. Currently an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Film Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. His latest co-productions, “Singing Pictures” and “Songs of a Sorrowful Man,” are about the changing practices of traditional scroll painter/singers in a Bengali village near Calcutta.
His work in progress, co-directed with Lina Fruzzetti, is a documentary feature entitled “In My Mother’s House,” will be released soon.

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: cb92@soas.ac.uk