Ethnographic Film Movies

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...

For months filmmaker Thierry Knauff lived with the Cameroonian tribe, the Baka. This is his document of that time.

Taking the form of a travel diary of a television journalist, this documentary tells about the life and work of the people of Yakutia: pilots,...

Biopic of Ceferino Namuncurá (1886-1905), son of a Mapuche cacique and a white woman, and the first Indian of South America to be beatified....

An autistic documentary filmmaker studies two neurotypicals, trying to understand their shared way of being through objects, language and small...

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...

Founding father of Anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski's work raises powerful and disturbing questions today. This is a look at his legacy and the...

In the South Seas, Samoan village life is portrayed with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a romanticized 'Gauguin idyll', the film...

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial...

Shigeki, one of the Ainu people of northern Japan, follows the traditions of his ancestors and teaches his son Motoki about their heritage. But how...

Shadows & Illuminations follows an older Balinese man, Nyoman Kereta, as he struggles with the intrusion of spirits into his consciousness. Kereta...

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...

The Bapst Brothers: Romain, Maurice and Jacques – whom we will also meet in The Gruyere Chronicle (produced in 1990) – are peasants and...

A young woman achieves cone consciousness.

This intimate ethnographic study of Voudoun dances and rituals was shot by Maya Deren during her years in Haiti (1947-1954); she never edited the...

The story of a poor girl who leaves her starving family and sheep for a more prosperous village. Her grandfather finds her and tries to convince her...

A seven-day initiation ceremony is documented in which two women undergo ritual healing following a diagnosis of spirit possession, presented without...

In February 1974, Pam Sambo Zima, the oldest of the priests of possession in Niamey, Niger, died at the age of seventy-plus years. In his backyard,...

An account of the journey that King Alfonso XIII of Spain made to the impoverished shire of Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in the...