Traditional storytelling, ironically, encapsulates the founding myths of a culture, giving them an efficacious voice, while actively revising them for the contemporary listener. Angano...Angano... makes savvy use of this irony as it pursues the oral tradition of Malagasy culture. Myths are recounted by avid storytellers who are self-consciously linked to their ancestral chronicles; these yarn-pullers view the tradition with reverence, yet offer their own topical embellishments in full bluster. The myths themselves are based on the fundamentals of rural life-the land and the people who inhabit it. Stories, from the origin of rice to the exhumation of the dead, are wildly told, humorously annotated, and sometimes questioned. "It's not me telling lies, but people of long ago-and that's how they heard it as well," says one wry fabulist whose name means "The Prince Who Remembers." Lushly photographed, this quietly innovative documentary offers evocative glimpses of Malagasy life as complement to (rather than explanation of) the stories. But the act of storytelling at the heart of Angano... is the bounty, the "ear's inheritance." --Steve Seid