Ethnographic Film Movies

Robert J. Flaherty's South Seas follow-up to Nanook of the North is a Gauguin idyll moved by "pride of beauty... pride of strength."

An intimate documentary about one family's endeavor to live as Ainu in today's Japan.

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 foot...

An ethnographic documentary about the Mangbetu tribe of the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The film features a discussion o...

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

AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles a...

The story of a poor girl who leaves her starving family and sheep for a more prosperous village. Her grandfather finds her and tries to convince her t...

An account of the journey that King Alfonso XIII of Spain made to the impoverished shire of Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in the region of E...

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 change...

Germaine Dierterlen talks about Dogon mythology at a conference on the Bandiagara cliffs. The Songo canopy is a sacred site in Bandiagara. Its walls a...

The Bapst Brothers: Romain, Maurice and Jacques – whom we will also meet in The Gruyere Chronicle (produced in 1990) – are peasants and carriers and w...

In front of Jean Rouch's camera, Germaine Dieterlen recalls her ethnographic itinerary, at the Musée de l'Homme, in Mali and in the Paris of the 1930s...

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

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, th...

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

Forest of Bliss is an unsparing yet redemptive account of the inevitable griefs, religious passions and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life...

The young goat herders from the cliff of Bandiagara practice on the stone drums of their ancestors. An ethnomusicological film experiment describing t...

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

Marianne Lehmann, born in Switzerland in 1936, married a Haitian and moved to Port-au-Prince in 1957. Fascinated by voodoo cult objects, she began wit...

An ethnographic film that tells the story of the mask makers and dancers during the festival of the Virgen del Carmen in Paukartambo, Cuzco. The dance...