Ainu Puri
2024 · 86m · Documentary
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 can old customs be revived after centuries of suppression?
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The Good Canadian
2025 · ★ 5.5
The world knows the image of the good Canadian. But what if there was a dark secret behind a national identity? THE GOOD CANADIAN exposes the truth behind the idea of a True North strong and free. In this unflinching and eye-opening documentary, directors Leena Minifie and David Paperny move us through the corridors of systemic inequity, from the Indian Act to residential schools, to modern-day family separation. Fusing shocking footage with detailed interviews with experts, advocates, whistleblowers and politicians, THE GOOD CANADIAN challenges national myth-making, while offering Canadians the chance to forge a new identity from the truth.
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Pam Kuso Kar (Breaking Pam's Vases)
1974 · ★ 9
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, the followers from the possession cult symbolically break the dead priest's ritual vases and cry for the deceased while dividing up the clothes of the divinities.
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2014 · ★ 1
A documentary film about Comanche activist LaDonna Harris, who led an extensive life of Native political and social activism, and is now passing on her traditional cultural and leadership values to a new generation of emerging Indigenous leaders.
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Miss Campbell: Inuk Teacher
2023
Part oral history and part visual poem, Miss Campbell: Inuk Teacher is the story of Evelyn Campbell, a trailblazer for an Inuit-led educational system in the small community of Rigolet, Labrador.
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The Lost Children
2024 · ★ 7.5
After a plane crash, four indigenous children fight to survive in the Colombian Amazon using ancestral wisdom as an unprecedented rescue mission unfolds.
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Encounters in Yakutia
1970
Taking the form of a travel diary of a television journalist, this documentary tells about the life and work of the people of Yakutia: pilots, artists, drivers, and reindeer herders.
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Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy
2021 · ★ 9
Follow filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as she creates an intimate portrait of her community and the impacts of the substance use and overdose epidemic. Witness the change brought by community members with substance-use disorder, first responders and medical professionals as they strive for harm reduction in the Kainai First Nation.
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One of Many
2004 · ★ 8.5
A woman with indiginous roots in her 40s goes on a trip into her past: When she was four years old she had been taken away from her mother by the canadian authorities, like many others. This is her very sad story as an example for many others.
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The Call of Fayu Ujmu
2002
A 13-year-old Indian boy is found unconscious after being attacked in the jungle by the evil spirit Fayu Ujmu. A shaman attempts to ritually tame the spirit and advises the boy’s father to capture it. This story is based on a Chachi Indian legend; it was shot with indigenous inhabitants of the jungle community of Loma Linda, on the Rio Cayapas.
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Color-Blind
2019 · ★ 4
A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present.
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A Wife Among Wives
1981 · ★ 6
David and Judith MacDougall are exploring the marriage rituals and roles of Turkana women in this ethnographic documentary. The film's biggest part is taken up by talks between the Turkana people. As one of the first ethnographic documentaries "A Wife Among Wives" subtitles these talks so that the viewer can get a better and probably more personal understanding of the life of the Turkana.
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