Robert Gardner
Description
Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story brings to life the story of a woman’s extraordinary courage, tested in the crucible of Nazi-occupied Paris. With an American mother and Indian Muslim father, Noor Inayat Khan was an extremely unusual British agent, and her life spent growing up in a Sufi center of learning in Paris seemed an unlikely preparation for the dangerous work to come. Yet it was in this place of universal peace and contemplation...
65) Forest of Bliss
Description
Forest of Bliss is an unsparing yet redemptive account of the inevitable griefs, religious passions and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, India's most holy city. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue.
66) Ika Hands
Description
In the highlands of Northern Columbia the Ika live a strenuous and isolated life, economically dependent on small gardens and a handful of domestic animals. They are thought to be descendants of the Maya who fled from the turmoil of Central American High Civilizations warring states to the remote valleys of Colombias Sierra Nevadas.
67) Sons of Shiva
Description
Sons of Shiva is a sustained attempt to film a four-day ceremony concerned with the worship of Shiva. Devotees of the God Shiva are shown from the initial taking of the Sacred Thread through gradually intensifying action to a culmination in a variety of ascetic and self denying practices.
Description
On the island of Pentecost in the New Hebrides archipelago, a few hundred Melanesians maintain a traditional life thanks to their geographic isolation and to the leaders who have resisted Christianity, schools and cooperatives. Bunlap, where this film was shot, is the largest and most important community of these people.
69) The Nuer
Description
The Nuer call themselves Naath. Only their immediate neighbors, the Dinka, Shilluk and Arabs, call them Nuer. Most foreigners, which includes those with whom the Nuer neither fought nor traded, are called Bar which means 'almost entirely cattleless'.
70) Altar of Fire
Description
This film records a 12 day ritual performed by Mambudiri Brahmins in Kerala, southwest India, in April 1975. This event was possibly the last performance of the Agnicayana, a Vedic ritual of sacrifice dating back 3,000 years and probably the oldest surviving human ritual.
Description
Beginning with The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins in 1969, Les Blank has become known for his films about indigenous southern music and various other topics. He has received numerous major awards including the British Academy Award for 'Burden of Dreams,' about Werner Herzog and the making of 'Fitzcarraldo,' top prizes at the Melbourne Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival for 'In Heaven There is No Beer?,' and the Maya Deren Award for...
72) Serpent Mother
Description
Serpent Mother is about devotion to the Goddess of Snakes and the importance of divine female power in West Bengal Indian life. The film's focus is the Jhapan Festival, the great celebration of snakes.
74) Blunden Harbour
Description
Robert Gardner, then a graduate student of Anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle, went to Blunden Harbour to research a major film project on the Kwakiutl about whom Ruth Benedict had written so eloquently. The larger work was never done and this small film remains one of the few authentic accounts of this once majestic people.
Description
The film explores the world's first major opinion poll, conducted by the Gallup organization. It asked Muslims from Indonesia to South Asia, to the Middle East, as well as minority communities in the US and Europe, what they thought about issues such as Gender Equality, Terrorism, and Democracy. It presented by Islamic scholars and the Gallup members themselves who give context and try to provide explanations for the results.
77) Rivers of Sand
Description
The people portrayed in this film are called Hamar. They dwell in the thorny scrubland of southwestern Ethiopia. They are isolated by some distant choice that now limits their movement and defines their condition.
Description
Spain was once home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews living together and flourishing. Their cultures and beliefs intertwined and the knowledge of the ancients was gathered and reborn, the very seeds of the Renaissance. Cities of Light explores the causes that destroyed the one civilization of pluralism and interfaith cooperation that for a few centuries lit the Dark Ages in Medieval Europe.
80) The Hunters
Description
This re-release of an early classic in anthropological film follows the hunt of a giraffe by four men over a five-day period. The film was shot in 1952-53 on the third joint Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored Marshall family expedition to Africa to study Ju/'hoansi, one of the few surviving groups that lived by hunting - gathering.