The Pirate and the Anthropologist

Original title Der Pirat. Chronik eines Wahlkämpfers

In 2012, former anthropologist Meinhart Ramaswamy is elected top candidate of the ambitious “Pirates Party“ for Lower Saxony’s state elections in 2013. His close friend, anthropologist-filmmaker Rolf Husmann, suggests to document the election campaign and to make a very personal film about it, which also includes their relationship since student days. By its construction, the film pays homage to Jean Rouch (Chronicle of a Summer) and Richard Leacock (Primary). Using Rouch’s self-reflective style and Leacock’s Direct Cinema-approach, it follows the candidate at party conventions, campaigning in streets and schools, appearing in a TV program. But it also touches upon Ramaswamy’s private life and talks about his family as well as the relationship between the two anthropologists. At the end two questions remain: Does the candidate reach his ambitious goals? And does the film succeed in creating the closeness between filmmaker and protagonist which they aimed at?

Author/s Rolf Husmann

Rolf Husmann, born in 1950, is a German anthropologist with a specialisation in anthropological filmmaking and the anthropology of sport. Apart from teaching Visual Ethnography at several universities, he worked from 1992 until 2010 at «IWF Knowledge and Media» in Göttingen (Germany) and made films, amongst others, about the Nuba of the Sudan, about wrestling in the Canary Islands and about Samoans in New Zealand as well as film portraits of Raymond Firth and Asen Balikci («The Professional Foreigner», 2009). He was chairman of the Commission on Visual Anthropology (CVA) from 2001-2008 and has been, from 1993 until 2014, co-director of the “Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival” (GIEFF). His latest project, “The Pirate and the Anthropologist”, is about his friendship with Meinhart Ramaswamy, an anthropologist who turned politician and tries to succeed for his Pirates’ Party in Lower Saxony’s elections of 2013.

Research Rolf Husmann
Photography Markus Hüsgen
Sound Rolf Husmann, Sarah Hüsgen
Editing Markus Hüsgen