“Hello, Orphanistas,” Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London) greets us as this video made for Orphans Online 2020 begins. It reminded me of her generous report on the 2019 NYU Orphan Film Symposium at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, which she entitled “An Orphans International.” There too she invoked the forced bilingual portmaneau that has hung around the event since 2001. I never intended orphanista to last beyond the symposium that featured films of the Mexican Revolution, but after Emily Cohen published “The Orphanista Manifesto” in American Anthropologist (Dec. 2004) it took on a life and a capitalization of its own.
Indeed the word was meant to hint at the internationalism of the orphan film phenomenon as well as the devotion that participants often bring to their adopted films and their screenings. The May 28 presentation about Polish migration to Brazil in the 1930s certainly imparts that spirit. An Italian-born scholar in England joins a team from the Polish national film archive to bring us a rediscovered piece shot in Brazil.
Soon this website will host a recording of the May 28 session called Great Migrations. For now, here is the 35-minute presentation prepared by Iga Harasimowicz, Michał Pieńkowski, and Grzegorz Rogowski (Filmoteka Narodowa, National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, FINA, Poland) and Ingravalle. They each tell us about the silent 8-minute film Osadnictwo polskie w puszczach Brazylii [Polish Settlements in Brazilian Wilderness] from 1933. The film itself is within the production.
As a stand-alone video on the Orphans Online streaming site, it has had some 2,500 views, with another 500 watching it as part of the livestream before it was temporarily removed. Such numbers suggest the strength of this piece and no doubt the passion and intellectual curiosity of the special audience sometimes called orphanistas.
Click to enlarge the frame, or view it directly at vimeo.com/422004699.