Where is Billet? # 224

Where is Billet?

14:00, Friday 14th June, CMB 3

rai 224 where-is-billet

  • Director/Anthropologist: Paul James Gomes, Lotte Hoek
  • Year of Release: 2011
  • Duration: 20 mins
  • Country of Production: UK / Bangladesh
  • Location: UK / Bangladesh
  • Ethnic Group: Bengali Migrants
  • Language: English, Bengali (English)

This film takes an auto-ethnographic perspective on a longstanding fantasy formation of South Asian culture: billet. This foreign paradise is a shared imaginary place that drives migrants from Bangladesh towards the UK. My film explores that cultural imagination ethnographically and starts from the visual culture of street print in Dhaka. My training in both anthropology and filmmaking allows me an ethnographic perspective on this cultural phenomenon and contributes to the anthropology of South Asian migration and contemporary British post-colonial society.

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Organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland (RAI) since 1985, it is an itinerant festival that moves biennially from one university host to another, in association with local community and cultural organisations.

The festival will be held from Thursday 13 June to Sunday 16 June 2013 in Edinburgh, hosted by National Museums Scotland and the STAR consortium. Scottish Training in Anthropological Research (STAR) is a collaboration between the Universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and St. Andrews. Over 60 new films will be screened alongside a conference 'New Observations' and a selection of special events and workshop about art & anthropology and the use of archival film.

The RAI Film Festival is held in collaboration with the Center for Visual Anthropology, University of Southern California.

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