Catalog Search Results
1) Kon-tiki
Description
Follows Thor Heyerdahl and his five crew members as they sail the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia by raft.
Description
Filmed over a span of 8 years, this film is based on dialogue between Zulay Saravino, an indigenous Otavaleña of Equador, and Mabel Prelorán, an Argentine anthropologist living in Los Angeles. The Otavalo Indians are industrious landowners and farmers who have also transitioned somewhat to a textile-based economy, selling handwoven garments to tourists at markets in Quito. The film shows the beautiful mountainous landscape of Zulay's home and the...
Description
200,000 years ago we took our first steps in Africa. Today there are seven billion of us living across the planet. How did our ancestors spread from continent to continent? This is a global detective story, featuring the latest archaeological discoveries and genetic research. On each continent, we track down the earliest members of our species, Homo sapiens. Who were these First Peoples? What drove them to the ends of the earth?
Description
The carved pillars of the matrilineal Amis tribe's famed ancestral house recount tribal legends such as The Great Flood and The Glowing Girl, and are home to the ancestral spirits of the Amis. The pillars, however, were removed from the village for exhibition in Taiwan's Institute of Ethnology Museum after a typhoon toppled the house 40 years ago. This film follows a group of young Amis who seek to restore their people's connection with their ancestors....
Description
Jean Rouch is known to many worldwide as a French anthropologist and innovative filmmaker. Much of his work is linked to the birth of cinéma vérité. However, Rouch's fifty-year involvement with a particular group of people in Niger shines a more personal light on his work - one of friendship and collaboration. Together with this group, Rouch made numerous ethnographic films and developed their own cinematographic style. These films have been termed...
Description
This is the first documentary about Black ASL: the unique dialect of American Sign Language (ASL) that developed within historically segregated African American Deaf communities. Black ASL today conveys an identity and sense of belonging that mirrors spoken language varieties of the African American hearing community. The program highlights the different uses of space, hand use, directional movement, and facial expression, which are ways that Black...
Description
This series of five films by Melissa Llelewyn-Davies looks at daily life among the Maasai. The films are presented as a diary of a 7-week visit to a single village. The structure is episodic and the content dependent on various events or stories, some of which are developed through more than one film. The tapes can be used independently or together, to give an in-depth sense of Maasai life. The senior man in the village is the most important Maasai...
Description
Originally filmed as an archival record of a Warlpiri (Walbiri) ceremony in 1967 by Roger Sandall, the film footage was re-worked 10 years later by anthropologist Nicolas Peterson and filmmaker, Kim McKenzie, to make this short version for public viewing. Involving large numbers of both men and women, Ngatjakula is one of the most spectacular ceremonies of central Australia, employing fire, and several days of singing and dance, to resolve conflicts...
Description
This film is a fine example of the many films that Roger Sandall made for the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in which he recorded Aboriginal craft techniques and skills, in this case, the process by which two men, Djurkuwidi and Wangamaru, work together to make a bark canoe. Near the end of the Wet season, in the coastal swamps of Buckingham Bay in Arnhem Land, thousands of magpie geese fly in to build nests in the reeds. Canoes are used to travel...
15) Banana split
Description
Explores identity and biracial ethnicity issues, focusing on Fulbeck's parents' relationship with each other and their respective acclimations and rejections of each others' cultures.
16) Lurugu
Description
Made at the request of the people of Mornington Island, this film was the first of five made by Curtis Levy for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now AIATSIS). Lurugu is the name of an initiation ceremony that had almost died out on Mornington Island (in the Gulf of Carpentaria in north Queensland) after mission contact during World War One. This film records the community's efforts to revive the ceremony after a lapse of 14 years. Before...
17) The living Maya
Description
This series documents life in a Yucatan village, focusing on one family over the course of a year. The films explore the ancient agricultural and religious customs that ground contemporary Maya life in traditional values - even as modern Mexico comes to the village. In Maya, Spanish, and English, with English subtitles. Film Festivals, Screenings, Awards CINE Golden Eagle Award PBS national broadcasts Margaret Mead Film Festival honoree Choice Outstanding...
18) First contact
Description
This is the classic film of cultural confrontation that is as compelling today as when it was first released over 20 years ago. When Columbus and Cortez ventured into the New World there was no camera to record the drama of this first encounter. But, in 1930, when the Leahy brothers penetrated the interior of New Guinea in search of gold, they carried a movie camera. Thus they captured on film their unexpected confrontation with thousands of Stone...
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