Angano...Angano...Tales from Madagascar ("Angano" means "story") showcases the living culture of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, who have weathered, since formal independence in 1960, a neocolonialist regime, an autarchic leftist government, and economic hard times that interweave with ecological depradation. The stories are told through the voices of several master storytellers, both men and women.

What initially appears a quaint recapturing of folklore gradually asserts itself as a powerful statement about a vital tradition, no backwater throwback but an aggressive confrontation with the folkways and ideologies of powerful industrial societies that these people recognize and challenge. As one historian meticulously explains near the end, the French mission civilisatrice was among other things an attempt to supersede and supplant Malagasy culture; but "oral history is our history."

Oral history, told through fantastic and witty tales, is also the present, not just of cultural premises but also lived experience. One woman recalls her childhood encounter with frightening spirits who inhabit not only folktales but apparently also the local river, from whence they snatched her laundry. As storytellers recount ancient myths, the camera wanders across the landscape of daily life, showing us the connection between, say, the story of how rice came to the Malagasy and rice planting today.

The tales themselves have a pungency and charm that gives special zest to the discovery of this complex culture. The origin of rice begins with a boy so lazy that he "waits for god to feed him." (Fortunately for him, he marries the right woman.) The origin of the custom of sacrificing zebu from their cattle herds is also a cautionary tale of greed and lack of deference. Perhaps the most astonishing sequence is one that highlights a custom that may be unique to the Malagasy, of unburying their family dead during an annual festival, where they celebrate the ancestors' part in the living family and then rewrap them tenderly and rebury them. Infused with folk memory, celebrated with lively song, and conducted in a raucous festival mood, the festival makes a New Orleans funeral march look tame. It also illuminates the importance of the Malagasy sense of place, one where one lives on in the lives of one's descendants.

The film thus celebrates Malagasy culture, elevating folklore to its proper place as part of the fabric of daily ideology, and reframing the importance of oral tradition. It thus has a more-than-Malagasy message as well, by focusing on the role of myth in culture, no matter how it is transmitted. 

File Name .........................................: Angano.avi
File Size (in bytes) ............................: 929,134,592 bytes
Runtime ............................................: 1:03:03

Video Codec ...................................: XviD ISO MPEG-4
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FPS .................................................: 29.970
Video Bitrate ...................................: 1729 kb/s
Bits per Pixel ...................................: 0.194 bpp
B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC.............: [B-VOP], [N-VOP], [], []

Audio Codec ...................................: 0x2000 (Dolby AC3) AC3
Sample Rate ...................................: 48000 Hz
Audio Bitrate ...................................: 224 kb/s [2 channel(s)] CBR
No. of audio streams .......................: 1
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0225070/

Malagasy audio; multilanguage (French, Malagasy, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic) subpack (idx/sub)

My rip

Angano...Angano...Tales from Madagascar (1989)