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"Old Spirits, New Persons" is the title of a 40 minute video film on the practice of indigenous healing. The film was made by Carla Risseeuw, anthropologist (University of Leiden) and edited by Metje Postma (University of Leiden).
Carla Risseeuw first met Rose, an indigenous healer and diviner in Western Province, Kenya during her medical fieldwork in Kenya. Over the years on return visits she attended several different forms of treatment. The film is compiled from several film sequences, shot in l976 and l992 with photographic material from the years in between. The film shows the development of Rose as a healer, from a young woman in her twenties working with one of her first patients, to an experienced and known healer treating a patient eighteen years later.
The main part of the film deals with the case of healing where Rose and her assistant Musa, treat a female patient on the compound of the patient's family. The film focuses on performance and event rather than on ritual and shows how the diviners work with their patient and persist for days when the healing does not take place. One also sees them off-stage: how they relate to their patient in between healing sessions; how they handle the relationships with the ancestral world, but also how they interact with the anthropologist as well as her - at times ambivalent - interpreter, who questions the healing as well as the work of an anthropologist.
In the film mental illness is viewed as a disturbed relationship between certain ancestors and the patient. The female patient suffers from several spirits, causing her illness of a total disinterest in life as well as occasional outbursts of anger.
Although not all goes as expected, when the film ends the patient is nearer to being cured and also to becoming a future diviner herself. The film aims to contribute to the interest in and debate on indigenous healing as well as forms of mental healing in general.
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