The Lion Hunters
Featured Director: Jean Rouch
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1h 20m
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1965 • 77 minutes
Shot on the border between Niger and Mali over a period of seven years, THE LION HUNTERS is Jean Rouch's documentation of the lion hunt performed by the gow hunters of the Songhay people.
Rouch has said that he made the film 'to try to give the audience a feeling of what I myself felt as I was learning the way of the lion hunt.' THE LION HUNTERS portrays the immediacy of the hunt, but it also explores the complex social organization that underlies it, and the difficult questions entailed by its representation.
"A film with great ethnographic detail… Rouch forces us to reflect on how we categorize experience, how we re-create our sociocultural universe."—Paul Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch
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Jean Rouch first went to Niger in 1941 as a 24-year-old civil engineer, building roads in the French colony. But unlike other colonists, he came to see Nigeriens as equals, spending much of the next 60 years in West ...
