Founding father of Anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski's work raises powerful and disturbing questions today. This film is a look at his legacy and the imprints it has made on the generations that followed. This event opens the 5th Anthropological Talks in South Tyrol Symposium with a screening of the film followed by a discussion with director Zachary Stuart.

Language(s): Film in English + discussion in English, German and Italian

In 1915, Bronislaw Malinowski set out to document the ‘exotic’ practices of a small group of islanders off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Four generations and almost one hundred years later, his great grandson traveled to the Trobriand Islands to examine the controversial legacy Malinowski left behind - within the field of anthropology, within his own family, and among the descendants of the people he studied.

The film is marked by the filmmaker’s personal voice as he asks the questions – How did his great grandfather’s work shape the field of anthropology? What were Malinowski’s intentions?  Was his work valuable to the Trobriand Islanders and what did he leave with them? Why was this man, a legend in his own time, buried in an unmarked grave?
The film follows a layered landscape of narrative threads: the story of Malinowski’s last surviving daughter and her ambivalence towards her father’s painful legacy; the Trobriand Islanders surprisingly personal relationship to Malinowski as they witness the impact of westernization on their customs; and the story of Malinowski himself – the triumphant, self-made mythical anthropologist.
A meditation on memory and it's fluidity, and the ways in which history and legacy are fabricated and preserved, Savage Memory asks viewers to question how we relate to our ancestors based on our cultural and personal experiences.
The film was an official selection at the Boston International Film Festival, Ethnocineca Vienna, Globians Doc Fest Berlin, Tawain International Film Festival, and Aspekty Poland.

Zachary Stuart
Director Zachary Stuart trained as a documentary filmmaker at Harvard’s program in Visual and Environmental Studies. His first film, This is Just This, used experimental sound and 16mm film to explore a first-person experience of North India.  He produced and directed a documentary short on an ex-prisoner storytelling project “Public Voices.” He has worked on a number of interdisciplinary video and film projects including camera work for the film Occupation and for two rock operas directed by Faith Soloway. He has traveled to Israel to document an ecumenical Palestinian Pilgrimage which included interviews with Yasser Arafat, and is working on a documentary titled Die Before You Die about female leadership in Sufism. Stuart has worked an arts educator and performer and is currently teaching at Harvard.

Organized by EVAA and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano