Ethnographic Film Movies

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

In Cerro Bayo, a mountainous region of Patagonia on the Chilean border, a Kolla Indian falls in love with a girl from another village. His mother...

This documentary started as part of a photography project about the indigenous Ainu population in northern Japan, portraying people from tightly knit...

Robert J. Flaherty’s follow-up to Nanook of the North shifts from the Arctic to the South Seas, portraying Samoan village life with a painterly...

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...

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...

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...

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

David and Judith MacDougall are exploring the marriage rituals and roles of Turkana women in this ethnographic documentary. The film's biggest part...

In the Darhat valley in northern Mongolia, the horses of nomadic tribes are stolen by bandits who then sell them to Russian slaughterhouses....

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...

The title of this film translates literally as 'to put on a hori,' a hori being the Songhay term for ceremony of festival. Here it is used to refer...

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

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....

As retailers, wholesalers, and negotiators, Asante women of Ghana dominate the huge Kumasi Central Market amid the laughter, argument, colour and...

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,...

Traversing 700,000 square kilometers over 700 days, the filmmakers bring the stories of five people who crisscross the Yellow River to perform their...

Remember the culture clash in THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY? This time it's real. One of the most ancient cultures on our planet is undergoing a major...

Portrays the Nuer, Nilotic herdsmen of the Nile basin. Shows how their daily lives revolve about their cattle, and depicts the psychological bonds...