Author Rina Sherman

Rina Sherman

Born in South Africa, Rina Sherman was exiled from the country and settled in France in 1984 where she has been living and working since. A classical musician by training, she worked as independent theatre actress and in television before turning to filmmaking. In 1990 she completed a doctorate with distinction at the Sorbonne, supervised by Jean Rouch. Her first novel, UITREIS, (Leaving) was published in South Africa in 1997 to critical acclaim. Writer, filmmaker and anthropologist, Rina has initiated several cultural projects. She was audiovisual director for the exhibition South Africa: Music of Freedom in La Villette, 1995. That same year, she was awarded the prestigious French prize, Villa Médicis Hors les Murs that allowed her to undertake extensive research in the film archives of the Southern African region. In 1996, she organized Jean Rouch's tour of South African universities in collaboration of the French Institute in South Africa (IFAS) and the Mission for Cooperation and Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Namibia. In 1997 Rina was awarded a Lavoisier Research Bursary by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the project The Ovahimba Years, a multi-disciplinary long-term research programme (drawings, oral tradition, video, film, photography) aimed at creating a living trace of Ovahimba cultural heritage. For a period of seven years, she filmed and photographed aspects of the daily and ritual lives of the Ovahimba.

The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema by Paul Henley

Rina Sherman

September 2013

Book Reviews

“I was trained by people who were important researchers and who were at the same time great poets.” - Jean Rouch in an interview with Enrico Fulchignoni. (1) When I read Paul Henley’s The Adventure of the Rea...

Phantoms Came to Meet: Guy Maddin’s Seances as Surrealist History of Cinema

Criminals Against Decoration: Modernism as a Heist

The New-Ark: trying to disavow anti-blackness

Claustrophobia and Intimacy in Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Her Smell

What’s in a Cone? Barbara Loden’s Wanda Between Weakness and Resilience

Come and See The Painted Bird: A Filmmaker’s Plea

Thresholds of Work and Non-Work in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s People on Sunday

East Asian Films at the 26th Toronto International Film Festival - A Report

The 34th Cinema Ritrovato Has Full Resuscitation under COVID

Women at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival

Lest We Forget: the 31st FID Marseille

A Vitalising Cinema in an Agitated Age: The 58th New York Film Festival

Locarno 2020: The Open Doors Experience

Your Daughters Come Back to You: The 28th Pan African Film and Arts Festival

Portrait of an Eternal Outsider: The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov by James Steffen

Trade Follows the Film: Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System by Lee Grieveson

War, Community, and the Cinema: Front Lines of Community: Hollywood Between War and Democracy by Hermann Kappelhof and Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris

The Perfect Conditional: Philippe Garrel by Michael Leonard

Creating the Appearance of Being: The Art of American Screen Acting 1960 to Today, by Dan Callahan

The Restless Spectator: Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, by Sarah Keller

Engaged Vision: Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave, by Steven Ungar

I Confess

Stairways to Paradise: Youssef Chahine and Alexandria…Why?

At Home Among Strangers (Свой среди чужих, чужой среди своих, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1974)

German Yearnings, East and West: The Sons of Great Bear (Josef Mach, 1966)

Waiting for Rain: Oppression and Resistance in Youssef Chahine’s The Land (1970)

Of East and West and High and Low: Lemonade Joe (1964)

A Man from the Boulevard des Capucines (Chelovek s bulvara Kaputsinov, Alla Surikova, 1987)

Benning, Sadie

Scott, Tony

Menzel, Jiří

Wise, Robert

Fernández, Emilio “Indio”

Fei Mu

Huston, John

The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema by Paul Henley