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Eric Coombs Esmail

Following the documentary impulse to the limits of observation.
2023 / 1987 
        

Critical   Media

Documentary & Pedagogy









Half-full.

Critical   Media

Documentary & Pedagogy



Messengers


              In 1979, Prof. Dennis Van Gerven exhumed the bodies of 400 Nubian mummies from the desert in Sudan.  They were itinerant farmers in the 6th and 7th centuries BC, but in the three decades after they were excavated, they would go to work again as "messengers from the poor."  At the end of his career, Van Gerven reflects on his life with the mummies and their afterlife in the United States speaking to the problems of poverty and discrimination.

Short documentary     2019
(co-directed with Christian Hammons)