On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.
The words of the women and the rhythm of their lives in the seclusion of family compounds suggests both the satisfying and the limiting aspects of a woman's role in a rural Afghan community. Filmed in the Balkh Province, an area inhabited by Tajik and other Central Asian peoples. The town of Aq Kupruk is approximately 320 miles northwest of Kabul. The theme of the film focuses on women. The film and accompanying instructor notes examine the economic, political, religious, and educational status of women, their legal and customary rights, and the degree of change in their actual and perceived roles.
A sensory record of the relationships of affinity and enmity with fire in the conservation of the Cerrado biome. In the company of local residents hired to act as brigadiers and, more recently, as management agents, the short film explores the affections established with fire in the midst of combat pyrophobias and management pyrophilias. In addition to documenting fire fighting and manipulation techniques, the cinematographic experiment points to a more than human visual anthropology, where environmental forces such as heat, vegetation and wind make up an alterity whose condition remains ambiguous.
In Brussels, Belgium, the Royal Museum of Central Africa is undertaking a radical renovation, both physical and ethical, to show with sincerity, crudeness and open-mindedness the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Belgian colonies in Africa, still haunted and traumatized by the ghost of King Leopold II of Belgium, a racist and genocidal tyrant.
Between Africa and the catalonian Penedés stands the distance of a videocamera. A cut. What is what, where are we, where did the songs we sang while we worked go, where is the group, the colective, the community?
IMAGINERO is an ethnobiography of Hermogenes Cayo, a self-taught woodcarver and painter who lives on the high Andean plateau of Argentina. The film portrays Hermogenes, his wife Aurelia Kilpe, and their children in their Andean lifestyle, as well as Hermogenes' passion for painting, carving, building, and his devotion to the Virgin Mary. Devout, austere and dedicated to craftsmanship, he can make anything from religious figures carved from cactus wood to a working harmonium. Inspired by a trip to Buenos Aires to advocate for land rights, Hermogenes has labored to replicate the style of the capital's grand cathedral and shrine to the Virgin with resourcefulness and skill.
At a 2005 Carnival night, something mysterious happens at Porto Formoso bay, leaving the fishing boats wrecked. Fishermen decide to build bigger boats, but at the small village harbor it is impossible to deck them. They demand the construction of a new harbor, but many inhabitants are opposed due to a Castle ruins that lay there. If to some residents ruins look worthless, for others they are the village soul and future, as a lot of tourists would like to visit them...While the landscape transforms, we follow the Director voice through the story of the last seven years of this community.
A documentary that invites us to discover the strange path led by the explorer-ethnographer Marquis de Wavrin who, in the 1920s and 1930s, made ethnographic films in several countries of Latin America.
A portrait of Santos Port, its geography, workers and the life that surrounds it, including the poor, prostitutes and the night life inhabitants.
Photo poetry of Bunchanawingʉmʉ Jesús Camilo Niño Izquierdo' piece of lost feelings in the Arhuaco Indigenous Reservation, northern Colombia.
With a dual motion a cruise ship and a fishing boat pass one another on the Nile and butlers in turbans set up a wooden gangway. Thanks to a rope and pulley system cows climb skywards then disappear into the hold of the sailing vessel. On the bank, black-haired women rock back and forth, bursting out laughing and showing the first signs of going into a state of trance. Never-before filmed gestures and faces of the people of the Nile succeed one another, uprooted to an unknown, magical world. The Banks of the Nile is one of the first experiments of film in colour that uses the Kinemacolor process.
In the heart of Rome, face to Saint Peter’s, stands a Palace. The owner, like a renaissance patron, has once been offering shelter to a bizarre group of friends, embracing their joyfully ambitious causes. The perfect hideout from where to pursue the most aleatory artistic projects, far from the hassles of life. Now in their 50s’, they are suddenly reunited by the premature death of their charismatic leader, Mauro. He left something tangible to the group of friends: hours of footage where he directed them in the most diverse roles, a supposed masterpiece that was never finished, and now a a mirror reflecting images from the past. The mourning, in the shudder of a moment, shakes the numbed spirits, leading them into a radical confrontation with their future.
In the 1950's, Jews coming from North Africa and the Middle East settled in the newly constituted State of Israël. The Mizrahim, as their are called, were denied their right to a better life and forced to move to development towns in the Negev Desert. Today, the new generations of Mizrahim still suffer from this policy conducted 70 years ago. Michale Boganim follows the footsteps of her father, who came from Morocco and quickly became a leader of the local Israeli Black Panthers to stand against this discrimination. She embarks on a road trip through Israël's history to meet with three generation of Mizrahims.
The story of the only three minutes of footage —a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938— showing images of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk (Poland) before the beginning of the Shoah.