Working in film, photography, and other media challenges anthropologists to tell stories that resist easy translation into written form. It also pushes us to critically ask what kinds of artistic practice are best matched to a particular ethnographic set of research questions, our place of research, and our methods. And finally, multimodal practice invites us to collaborate with artists and communities whose skill sets and sensibilities we could never replicate on our own.Â
Containment and Flow is an ongoing ethnography-film collaboration in Rufiji, Tanzania. Footage included here is unfinished, meant for showing work-in-progress rather than a finished film.
As part of our ethnographic-film collaboration, we regularly assemble rough cuts of collected footage from a fieldwork period. The rough cuts are screened in Kindwitwi for community feedback and discussion. This cut of Containment and Flow was initially screened in town in Summer 2025. This is not a polished film, but rather an ethnographic tool for supporting multimodal collaboration.
The "Upiga Picha: Zoezi la Kwanza" trailer showcases the first work produced by eight students in an introductory photography and film course in Kindwitwi, Rufiji, Tanzania. The material was created during our first class session. Students will continue producing work throughout 2026 toward a 2027 exhibition.
In Rombo, in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania, wealth, identity, and kinship pass not through bodies but through the land and the houses that are built to care for it. Ardhi (Land) is a short film-ethnography made in collaboration between an ethnographer (Rebekah Ciribassi) and a filmmaker (Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe), with production assistance from Sophia George Mrema. More than a cinematic output, this small project was an opportunity to learn the basic skills of each other's practice. The film documents the construction of a new house built by the younger generation of a single Chagga family in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania, and is narrated by recorded conversations about land, building, and inheritance.
Funding was provided by a small student film grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts (2021).