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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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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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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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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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.
More info →Dancing with the Incas
1992
Documentary about the most popular music of the Andes -- Huayno music -- and explores the lives of three Huayno musicians in a contemporary Peru torn between the military and the Shining Path guerrillas.
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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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Himalayan Herders
1997
John Bishop and Naomi Bishop present a portrait a peculiar life style of the Himalayan indigenous Sherpa people in their documentary , the Himalayan Herders. The 76 minutes long film is about the diverse culture and life style of herders community near Mt. Everest region of Nepal.The film was made in 1997 as a part of Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology Series.
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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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The Hunters
1957 · ★ 6.5
An ethnographic documentary following four Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) men during a multi-day giraffe hunt in the Kalahari Desert, filmed during the Smithsonian–Harvard Peabody expedition of 1952–53.
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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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Mountain Town
2006
This documentary looks at the stories of a few people in Aspen Colorado and how they contribute to the community.
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