Kwaheri: Vanishing Africa
★ 5.5 · 1964 · 80m · Documentary
Early Mondo film featuring primitive rituals, animals being butchered, unusual birth defects, and a legit trepanation scene.
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After Mein Kampf?
1961 · ★ 9
By combining actual footage with reenactments, this film offers both a documentary and fictional account of the life of Adolf Hitler, from his childhood in Vienna, through the rise of the Third Reich, to his final act of suicide in the waning days of WWII. The film also provides considerable, and often shocking, detail of the atrocities enacted by the Nazi regime under Hitler's command.
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Funeral Chants from the Georgian Caucasus
2007
A short film set in the mountainous province of Svaneti, documents the performance of polyphonic men’s funerary laments common to the region.
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Cannibals Tomorrow
1983 · ★ 8
It is a documentary, which submits to the public the most dramatic, subhuman situations in which men find themselves living in all corners of the world. From India to Brazil, from the African nations of the Sahel to Bolivia, the camera ruthlessly shows the images of a humanity marginalized in a thousand ways by the so-called"civil consortium".
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Forbidden France
1984 · ★ 3.6
Rare mondo film focusing on the seamier side of Paris. Crazy fashions, transgender hookers, coke snorting New Wavers, female body builders, nude beaches, leather bars, a wealthy playboy’s private torture dungeon and some X-rated dildo insertion to liven things up.
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1991
Exploring individual responses to rapid social change, Cowboy and Maria in town follows the parallel lives of its two central characters. Cowboy and Maria have independently landed in Port Moresby, negotiating ways to survive urban life in a city ranked as one of the most dangerous in the world. Cowboy is an ex-raskol (urban bandit) and Maria an inhabitant of a squatter settlement. Unemployed and with a jail record, Cowboy has constructed an electric guitar out of scrap materials and plays on street corners. Maria lives an equally precarious existence, cultivating a seasonal garden in an urban settlement inflamed by frustration and intertribal conflicts. Far from being third world victims, they go about their daily lives with humour and imagination, rising to the challenge of enormous cultural upheaval.
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Euskal herri-musika
1978
An ethnographic documentary which looks at the relationship between music and work in predominantly rural cultures. It depicts the lives of fisherman, shepherds and farmers and their relationship with music. The film also describes Basque ancestral instruments, with special emphasis on the origin and history of ‘bertsolarism’ (Basque verse singing) as a form of oral communication.
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Chroniques d'un village tzotzil
1992
A documentary about the daily life of a native Tzotzil community in southern Mexico, shot over a period of eight years.
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Decolonising the Curatorial Process
2020
Decolonising the Curatorial Process is a forty-minute documentary which explores decolonial strategies in an academic and curatorial context. The film features academics, activists and practitioners, and contains case studies of institutions that are deploying critical, self-reflective forms of curatorial practice. The Museum of London Docklands exhibition on slavery and the sugar industry is examined as an example of how an institution can decolonise the curatorial process, utilise the work of artists in a museum context, and critically examine East London's imperial history. The Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, who are working with Maasai activists from Kenya and Tanzania on a project centred on repatriating the museum's collection of sacred Maasai artefacts, also features in the film.
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Naked Spaces: Living Is Round
1985 · ★ 6.2
Shot with stunning elegance and clarity, NAKED SPACES explores the rhythm and ritual of life in the rural environments of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal). The nonlinear structure of NAKED SPACES challenges the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking, while sensuous sights and sounds lead the viewer on a poetic journey to the most inaccessible parts of the African continent: the private interaction of people in their living spaces.
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Melodies of the mountains
2006
Film about the singing and dancing culture of the Ingush people
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Ekstase - Der Prozeß gegen die Satansmädchen
1979 · ★ 5
Mondo Cane and the Schoolgirl Report series stand as obvious influences on this occasionally amusing but generally rather tedious exploitation film that alternates between documentary, fake documentary and docudrama. The theme is Satanism and the linking thread is a recreation of what is supposedly the real-life case of a murder and attempted murder of two Munich teenage men by a quartet of girls who had been dabbling in devil worship. During the ensuing trial, the lawyer resorts to dilatory tactics while the hearing is frequently interrupted by the girls breaking into incantation, temper tantrums or shivery fits ostensibly bearing on demonic possession. When the subject of the Manson killings is brought up, the most obnoxious of the defendants breaks in indignantly, claiming that Sharon Tate’s “execution” was justified as she posed dangers to the Satanic community.
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