Dogon Drums, Elements of a Study in Rhythm(1966)

Pylon(en)

A young woman achieves cone consciousness.

Attiuk(fr)

The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed documentary about the rituals surrounding an Innu caribou hunt. Released in 1960, it’s one of 13 titles in Au Pays de Neufve-France, a series of poetic documentary shorts about life along the St. Lawrence River. Off-camera narration, written by Pierre Perrault, frames the Innu participants through an ethnographic lens. Co-directed by René Bonnière and Perrault, a founding figure of Quebec’s direct cinema movement.

Gringo Trails(en)

Are tourists destroying the planet-or saving it? How do travelers change the remote places they visit, and how are they changed? From the Bolivian jungle to the party beaches of Thailand, and from the deserts of Timbuktu, Mali to the breathtaking beauty of Bhutan, GRINGO TRAILS traces stories over 30 years to show the dramatic long-term impact of tourism on cultures, economies, and the environment.

Land Rush(en)

A partnership between the Government of Mali and an American agricultural investor may see 200-square kilometers of Malian land transformed into a large-scale sugar cane plantation. Land Rush documents the hopes, fears, wishes, and demands of small-scale subsistence farmers in the region who look to benefit, or lose out, from the deal.

A Powerful Noise(en)

Bookended by call-to-action quotes from Margaret Mead and Mahatma Gandhi, this inspiring documentary follows three extraordinary women -- in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mali, and Vietnam -- as they lead day-to-day battles against ignorance, poverty, oppression, and ethnic strife.

El canto de los dioses(es)

Road documentary that delves into the musical and religious expressions of sub-Saharan Africa. Through Mauritania and Mali, the film documents the lives of Dogon, griots, musicians and instrument makers who, through oral accounts, explain why music plays a fundamental role in the socio-religious organization of peoples. The film culminates its search with the recording of the performance of the traditional Dogon mask dance, in Begnematou, a small village lost in the desert.

Afghan Nomads (The Maldar)(en)

At dawn a nomad caravan descends on Aq Kupruk from the foothills of the Hindu Kush. In their camp, and in commerce with the townspeople, the Maldar reveal the mixture of faith and distrust that has kept nomads and sedentary people separate and interdependent over the centuries. The theme of the film focuses on political and religious beliefs. The film and accompanying instructor notes in this series embrace five different and complex units of analysis concerning how political change occurs; individual attitudes, ethnic identity, national loyalties, institutional affiliations, and ideological beliefs.

An Afghan Village(en)

A collage of daily life in Aq Kupruk builds from the single voice that calls the townspeople to prayer, the brisk exchange of the baazar, communal labor in the fields, and the uninhibited sports and entertainment of rural Afghans. The theme of the film focuses on rural society. The film and accompaning instructor notes explore concepts of development, modernization, environmental equilibrium, and especially change, identifying change agents, and analyzing barries and stimulants to change.

Amin(en)

AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.

Behind the Shadows(el)

The Greek shadow puppetry began 130 years ago. A student of Greek shadow puppetry travels to China, where shadow puppetry began over 2000 years ago. There he follows Chinese shadow puppeteer master He Shihong in Wushan of China. Watching his performances and listening to him talk about his art and his career in it, many parallels are drawn and he expresses them by including his Greek shadow puppetry teacher in the film. This documentary is a cultural bridge between Greece and China through the art of shadow puppetry.

Séo!(fr)

The film shows Catherine Destivelle's trip to Dogon Country, in Mali, where she will make spectacular free solo rock climbing ascents in the sun-warmed cliffs of Bandiagara. Destivelle is accompanied on this trip by a friend climber, Lucien Abbet. A film by Pierre-Antoine Hiroz produced in 1987 by Paradoxe and also featuring Tidjani Koné, Ibrahim Dolo, and the Dogon inhabitants of the Bandiagara Escarpment. The film won the Genziana D'argento for best free climbing film at the Trento Film Festival in 1987.

Creature Catalogue(da)

Pileni paualala. Dried giant clams in the Reef Islands(en)

The Reef Islands Ethnographic Film Project was started in 1994 by the two anthropologists, Jens Pinholt and Peter I. Crawford, and village communities in Bekapoa, Ngasinue/Fenualoa and Vaiakau. Field and film visits took place in 1994, 1995-1998, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2017. This film is based on one such visit in June 2015, by Peter I. Crawford and Birgitte Hansen, a nutrition expert. The focus was on a diachronic study of nutrition, collecting information in three villages and comparing it with material from the 1970s and the 1990s. Pileni was one of the villages.

Tuo Dolphins(en)

On the night of 3 August 1996 a school of striped dolphins ran ashore near the village of Tuo on Ngasinue/Fenualoa Island in the Reef Islands (Solomon Islands). Dolphins have a special kinship-related link to the Aiwoo-speaking people in Tuo. Moffat Bonunga tells the legend or so-called local kastom story that explains why. Moffat's explanations are linked with those of another local expert, Commins Veio, who tells his version of the story to Nathaniel Meningi inside the men's house (sapolau) in Tuo. The night the dolphins run ashore, Moffat immediately contacts the film crew - the villagers want the crew to film this peculiar phenomenon. Although the film focuses on the kastom story and the villagers' re-enactment of the hunt, it also documents the villagers' joy that the sea once again has proved an important source of food.

Gathering Firewood(en)

The film follows a group of Nenets women gathering firewood in a snow-covered tundra. This film is part of a larger Yamal Nenets Series, which explores the daily life of nomadic reindeer pastoralists on the Yamal peninsula in Western Siberia during the calving period in the spring. The footage for the series was captured during a three-month period of ethnographic fieldwork in 1999.

Hombres de barro(en)

A group of filmmakers travel to a Kolla community in Salta to film their folkways. We see all aspects of their life: farming, herding, cooking, football, and making music during a Pachamama festival. In the course of filming, the leader of the Kolla community changes the filmmakers' view of what the documentary should be, and at the end of their visit they are changed. "La vida se puede ir amasando, como el barro": As life goes along, it becomes more pliant, like clay. An announcement at the beginning of the film states that this is neither fiction nor documentary, but I'd say it's closer to documentary.

Los Toques del Tambor Afro Montevideano(es)

Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti(en)

This intimate ethnographic study of Voudoun dances and rituals was shot by Maya Deren during her years in Haiti (1947-1951); she never edited the footage, so this “finished” version was made by Teiji Ito and Cherel Ito after Deren’s death.

Hampi(fr)

A ritual vase, the hampi, is placed in the center of the Musée de plein air de la République du Niger in Niamey, during a ritual ceremony featuring possession dances. With this film, Jean Rouch continues his ethnological and cinematographic study of Songhay ritual objects. He demonstrates that, in a particular context, the transfer of a hampi vase to a museum requires the organization of a ritual ceremony to obtain the gods' approval. At the time, however, reservations about filming a possession dance for the opening of a shrine in a museum made the move "questionable from a museological point of view".

Yenendi de Ganghel (Rain Dance at Ganghel)(fr)

Lightning struck the hut of a Fulani shepherd near a village of settled fishermen, Ganghel, in Niger. A yenendi, a purification ceremony to obtain "water from the sky but not fire from the sky", is organized, with Sorko priests, ritual musicians and dancers, and the faithful from Niamey. The musicians call on Dongo, god of storms, and his brother Kirey, god of lightning. To the rhythm of the orchestra, a man goes into a trance, becoming Dongo's horse and at the same time the riding genie. Then a woman is possessed by Kirey. When the riding gods have mastered their horses, the gods visit the men. Dongo purifies the lightning-struck land and the oldest fisherman prepares the purification vessel, addressing Dongo.