Messengers by Eric Coombs Esmail & Christian Hammons

An anthropologist reflects on his life, career, and the 1,000-year journey of 400 Nubian mummies. 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.

Artist Bio

Eric Coombs Esmail is a documentary artist, critical pedagogist, and community activist interested in labor, spirituality, and the politics of human migration. Trained as a cinematographer, he has worked across film and video production for interactive media, performance, installation, and theatrical release. His practice has taken him both far afield and close to home, from Palestine to Pennsylvania, where he has explored ideas around power, place, and human experience.  

Christian Hammons is a writer, producer, and director who works in documentary, fiction, and the space in between. Ethnographically informed, his work often focuses on the everyday lives of marginalized people. His most recent work is the documentary feature American Refuge (co-directed with Eric Coombs Esmail), about homelessness in the forests of the American West. The film will premiere in 2025. Other recent work includes the short film Rumor, which premiered at the Beverly Hills Film Festival in 2020, the short documentary Messengers, which premiered at the IFS Los Angeles Film Festival in 2019, and the short film Lemonade, which premiered at the Lone Star Film Festival in 2018. His in-between work includes the live documentary Tripod: Mead, Bateson, Bali and participatory media projects on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota and in the Mentawai Islands in Indonesia.