Wooden boatbuilding - Faber Navalis: a film by Maurizio Borriello

Restoration of a wooden ship recognized as historical maritime treasure by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage.
Faber Navalis is Latin for Boatbuilder: words in an ancient language for describing an ancient profession.
It might seem just a video about the restoration of a wooden ship, but the actual subject of this documentary film is the state of mind of its shipwright: an Italian researcher in maritime ethnography who decided to learn boat building skills in order to understand the tacit knowledge hidden behind the construction of a wooden ship.
This film is an experiment in autobiographical ethnography in which the shipwhright is also the filmmaker, at the same time director and directed, both silent artisan and self-aware documentarist: a combination of aesthetics and ethnography which attempts to bring out an inner dimension that may only with difficulty, if it all, be rendered with propositional prose.

I’m an Italian boatbuilder, filmmaker and independent researcher in cultural anthropology.
My major areas of interest are coastal communities, boatbuiding technology and transmission of knowledge. My research interests focus on maritime cultures of the Indian Ocean from ethnographic and archaeological perspectives. This video is a chapter of my lifelong participant observation fieldwork.
After graduating in Asian and African Languages I moved to Indonesia where I had a teaching assignment at State University of Jakarta. In those years I carried out a research project in maritime ethnography on living boatbuilding traditions in S-E Asia collecting data on boat types, construction techniques, local response to the introduction of western technology and its social and cultural effects on the maritime communities. The practical aspects of this fieldwork experience made me realize the limits of my methodology. All those wooden vessels were built "by eye" guided by an intangible knowledge and I considered my "blindness" a problem of epistemological relevance. I felt I couldn't really understand the development of the technology and investigate the transmission of knowledge without acquiring practical boatbuilding skills. Since then much of my time has been spent in boatyards working as apprentice boatbuilder in Tsunami-hit countries, Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean. 
In the last four years I've been working as wooden ship restorer at the maritime museum in Norway. I am also designing an appropriate and versatile technology which attempts to improve traditional boatbuilding. I believe in the potential key role of the boats to reduce isolation improving rural access and mobility through the development of rural water transport.
Boatbuilding, Photography, Editing: Maurizio Borriello
Music: Francesco Di Bella & Ballads Cafè
Assistant Editor: Mauro Milanese

https://www.facebook.com/fabernavalis/

Official Selection and Awards:
San Francisco International Ocean Film Festival (USA) - (WINNER: IOFF 2017 MARITIME AWARD);
New York Craft in Focus Festival (USA);
Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival (Taipei - Taiwan);
Napoli Film Festival (Italy);
International Heritage Film Festival (UNESCO - Portugal);
Delhi International Film Festival (India);
Iran International Documentary Film Festival (Tehran - Iran);
Festival Internacional do Filme Etnográfico do Recife (Brazil);
Days of Ethnographic Cinema (Moscow - Russia);
Campania Film Festival Ethnography (Italy) - (WINNER: 2017 DOCUMENTALIA AWARD);
Amsterdam Ambacht in Beeld Festival (Netherlands);
Arctic Moving Image & Film Festival (Norway);
Tartu World Film Festival (Estonia);
Szczecin European Film Festival (Poland);
Apricot Tree International Documentary Film Festival - Ethnography and Anthropology (Yerevan-Armenia);
International Film Festival, Water, Sea and the Ocean (Czech Republic);
IntimaLente - Festival of Visual Ethnography (Italy) (Special Mention);
Riga Pasaules Film Festival (Latvia);
Troia Teatro Festival (Italy);
Whakapapa Film Festival (Italy) (Special Mention);
Open Art Short Film Festival (Germany) (2nd prize for Best Director of Photography and 2nd prize for Best Fine Art Film);
13th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (Göttingen - Germany);
International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra (Greece);
South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayaking Symposium (USA);
Arctic Open International Film Festival (Russia);
Peloponnesian International Film Festival (Greece);
KRAFTA DOC International, Art Making Film Festival (UK);
The Society for Photographic Education Media Festival (USA)

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