Kingston Daily Freeman, July 11, 2008
Red Hook man screens 'The Linguists'

Bonnie Langston

A Red Hook filmmaker whose documentary was chosen as a selection of this year's Sundance Festival remembers the butterflies he felt as he left for Siberia, Bolivia and India to search for speakers of nearly extinct languages, the subject of the film.

Seth Kramer, director of "The Linguistics," will answer questions about the documentary following its screening Saturday at the Ancram Opera House in Ancram. The event is a fundraiser for the space.

It turned out that Kramer's original trepidation had basis in reality. The trip to India, for instance, became worrisome not only for him but also for the rest of the film crew, including co-directors and producers Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy S. Newberger as well as the two scientists who were featured along with native speakers.

They were all in search of a nearly dead language in a tribal region in the Central Eastern part of the country, specifically its poorest state, Orissa.

"Ten French scientists were killed in that region maybe a month and one-half before we arrived," Kramer said, by a band of terrorists. "We didn't run into them. If we had, we would have been dead."

Kramer said, too, that halfway through the trip he contracted walking pneumonia, which required a month's recuperation after returning home.

Nevertheless, he said the project was rewarding.

"It was such a rush of faces and colors and languages and cultures and music and sights and music and smells," he said.

Then again, it was so much more. It was a quest to document and, indeed, help save some of the disappearing 7,000 languages that Kramer said still exist in the world. Every two weeks, on average, he said, one falls out of use completely. All languages, he said, have value.

"I think it's impossible to understand the planet you live on," he said, "without some understanding of its languages.

"(Additionally) a language ought to be a basic human right. So if people are losing their language, their right is being sort of imposed upon. And that is often the case."

Although Kramer's views are clear, he said filmmakers did not go out of their way to advocate the saving of languages. Instead, he said, the hope is viewers will make up their own minds about its importance.

Among the interviewees who make the case for language maintenance, but with a light touch, is a driver whom the film project hired in Siberia. After the two scientists unsuccessfully searched for a speaker of a disappearing language called Chulym, the driver finally admitted he spoke it fluently.

"That guy was like a gold mine," Kramer said. "We knew people were ashamed to speak their language, and we knew that people would even hide it. We knew that sometimes when scientists visit these communities they reawaken a spark and an in interest in the language. He was like all of these things in an actual person. He was eloquent, too."

The film has given him and those from other countries, as well as American Indians on a reservation in Arizona, a voice. And that voice is getting out into the public more and more. In addition to Sundance, the film was shown at a festival in Michigan last month, and last week it premiered in Siberia. In October it will be shown in Paris in connection with the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO.

"I may have to go to that one," Kramer said.

The documentary was his idea. Because he was among the first generation of his family who could neither speak nor understand Yiddish, he began researching it. Then he learned of severely endangered languages, some with only one speaker remaining. Exploring a few of them became his renewed focus.

From a search that began with noted linguist Noam Chomsky, Kramer eventually came to a name he heard repeatedly, David Harrison, who in turn brought aboard another scientist, Gregory Anderson. Both men worked hard during the filming to find failing languages and record them, just as the film's crew did.

"The challenge was to make it really exciting and interesting and funny, on the one hand," Kramer said, "and then to try ... a really exciting way to get some complicated ideas across."

The scientists and crew succeeded by venturing not only into languages that were disappearing but cultures which are equally hidden. One of their excursions was to the Andes in Bolivia, where they met a tribe of medicine men who spoke Kallawaya, a language of fewer than 100 speakers. The scientists and film crew recorded for apparently the first time ever the language as well as a ritual for which it is integral.

"That involved an animal sacrifice ...," Kramer said. "It was an incredible experience to be there. You felt like you were capturing something extremely important, an important moment even in history. The excitement of being able to bring that to an audience - at the Ancram Opera House - that was memorable."

IF YOU GO

WHAT: The documentary, "The Linguists"

DETAILS: Seth Kramer of Red Hook, a director of the film, will participate in a question-and-answer session following its screening, a benefit for the Ancram Opera House.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Ancram Opera House, 1330 County Route 7, Ancram

HOW MUCH: $15 in advance; $20 at the door

CALL: (518) 329-7393

ONLINE: www.ancramoperahouse.com

(Photo provided: "The Linguists" director and camera man Seth Kramer of Red Hook checks for footage on the way to a village of Kallawaya tribesmen in the Bolivian Andes Mountains.)