Choqela: Only Interpretation
1987 · 12m · Documentary
This provocative and profound film documents the Choqela ceremony, an agricultural ritual and song of the Aymara Indians of Peru. By offering several different translations of the proceedings, the film acknowledges the problems of interpretation as an inherent dilemma of anthropology.
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My Best Fiend
1999 · ★ 7.4
A film that describes the love-hate relationship between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, the deep trust between the director and the actor, and their independently and simultaneously hatched plans to murder one another.
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Machete Gillette... Mama
1989 · ★ 6
"With characteristic wit and rigor, experimental filmmaker Larry Gottheim here applies his impressionistic editing style to footage collected during his travels in the Dominican Republic. Gottheim’s formal emphasis on repetition and fissures between sound and image resonates here as a mode of sociological reflection (with the fragmentary montage mirroring elements of ritual while also destabilizing the ethnographic gaze). A largely overlooked antecedent to the contemporary blending of avant-garde and ethnographic filmmaking, MACHETTE GILLETTE… MAMA still poses a potent challenge to documentary convention." - Max Goldberg
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Smoke and Rubber: Inside Modified Car Culture
2025
Speed, emotion, dream. Smoke and Rubber follows the drivers of Istanbul who dedicate it all to modified car culture. Beyond the noise, it traces how speed, sound, and the performance of masculinity define a way of living, from the garage to the streets. Based on ongoing research, this is a reflective portrait of a noisy world.
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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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2014
Experimental ethnographic digital feature exploring International student and teacher identity expressed through musical performance at the University of Jinan, Shandong, China.
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Japan in Feast
1918 · ★ 6.5
An actuality film showing a Buddhist festival in Kyoto. The procession includes Buddhist monks, geishas, and others dressed coordinately to the Japanese tradition.
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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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Folia no Morro
2008
An ethnographic documentary following the Folia de Reis party that is celebrated every year at Morro de Santa Marta on Rio de Janeiro.
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Congo
1972 · ★ 5.8
An experimental ethnographic documentary that criticizes the colonizer view of anthropology.
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Melodies of the mountains
2006
Film about the singing and dancing culture of the Ingush people
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Piripkura
2018 · ★ 8
The last two surviving members of the Piripkura people, a nomadic tribe in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, struggle to maintain their indigenous way of life amidst the region's massive deforestation. Living deep in the rainforest, Pakyî and Tamandua live off the land relying on a machete, an ax, and a torch lit in 1998.
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