About movie

The Story of a Kara hunting Ritual

Original title Morokapel’s feast

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This film tells the story of a hunt and its repercussions in the land of the Kara, Ethiopia. Morokapel has killed a leopard with a self-made trap. He brings the magnificent leopard skin to his mother-brother Samo in another village, who then holds for him a hunting ritual, en dowing Morokapel with a higher status. The festivities take a surprising turn the morning after the ceremony: Morokapels supporters try to deny Samo the right to the valuable trophy through reinterpretation of ritual rules. The film illustrates how even traditional rituals can be manipulated for the economic and tactical interests. The film tries to develop these cultural ambiguities by dealing with the ethnographic encounter in a reflexive and transparent way.

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Author/s Steffen Köhn

Steffen Köhn
has studied social anthropology and film at the universities of Mainz and Berlin, focusing on questions of visual anthropology and the new field of media anthropology. For his MA thesis he did research in Ghana on the West African video film industry. In 2006 he has taken up studies in directing at the Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, where he plans to continue his work on documentary film-making.
Felix Girke
has an MA in social anthropology from the University of Mainz. He is at the moment writing up his PhD thesis on social relations in Kara, Southern Ethiopia, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale. He has spent about 18 months on cumulative research in Kara and also works out of the South Omo Museum and Research Center (SORC) in Jinka, Ethiopia.

Research Felix Girke
Photography Steffen Köhn
Sound Felix Girke & Steffen Köhn
Editing Steffen Köhn & Florian Walter