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- This little-known World War II battle with Japanese forces on the Alaskan island of Attu includes the accounts of two surviving soldiers. The film tells of the tragic operation that saw ill-prepared American troops take on massive casualties.
- An Autobiography of Michelle Maren is another gripping portrait from the Michel Negroponte, the director of Jupiter's Wife. Once again, Negroponte's subject is a haunted woman whose past will not release her. The film begins with an email from Michelle Maren to the filmmaker because she has seen and admired Jupiter's Wife. A middle-aged former beauty queen, go-go dancer, professional escort, and porn star, Michelle lives on disability checks and struggles with clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders and childhood trauma. Isolated and alone, she is seeking transformation and another chance through film. What unfolds is a cinematic blend of exposure therapy, psychological investigation, and confession. Secrets are revealed and the film builds to a startling conclusion that is as riveting as any fiction.
- In 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' a politically active Kansas megachurch splinters, moves to an amusement park, and when that fails, a Best Western motel. Meanwhile, an idealistic farmer revives Kansas' progressive tradition, taking his message all the way to Washington, D.C.
- This film follows the hunting of a giraffe by four members of the Ju/'hoansi (a !Kung Bushmen tribe) over a 13-day period in the Kalahari desert. The film consists of footage shot in 1952-53 on a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody expedition.
- The students of England's only free school defend themselves before Parliament, as it attempts to shut down their school.
- A detailed overview of contemporary life in the tiny South Pacific country of Tuvalu, this film documents the earth's first sovereign nation faced with total destruction due to the effects of global warming. With a population of about 11,000 living on a total landmass of only 20 square miles - less than Manhattan - spread over nine low-lying atolls 600 miles to the north of Fiji, Tuvalu has been inhabited for over four millennia. The warm-spirited and highly community-oriented people of this ex-British colony struggle to survive economically while confronting the likelihood of having to evacuate their homeland en masse within the next 50 years. As the industrial world just begins to address the threat and causes of global warming, rising seas and increasingly violent changes in climate have already left their marks on this poor island nation. The government of Tuvalu and other concerned organizations are directing their pleas for solutions to the wealthy countries whose high pollution emissions could be the central human contribution to this phenomenon. Observation, narration, and interviews with Tuvalu citizens from various walks of life flesh out a full portrait of a unique community confronting a dubious future on the front lines of a global environmental assault.
- This film provides a broad overview of !Kung life, both past and present, and an intimate portrait of N!ai, a !Kung woman who in 1978 was in her mid-thirties.
- An examination of biculturalism wrapped in an extraordinary personal odyssey.
- An unvarnished look at the lives of Innu teenagers in a small Canadian village where ancestral ways have collided with modern ones and the result is addiction, suicide, lack of jobs, and hopelessness.
- This film was shot in Cuba in 1994. The opportunity came when Russel Porter, an Australian documentary filmmaker, was invited to teach at the international film and television school (EICTV) located some forty kilometers from Havana.
- Five individuals with disabilities unlock their potential towards employment, live independently and show the value they can bring to society.
- A rare, intimate look at the spiritual and social life of the Yup'ik Eskimo people of Emmonak, Alaska - a culture centered around traditional gift-giving ceremonies featuring dances and drum music.
- Ben Thresher's mill is one of the few water-powered woodworking mills left in the United States. Operating in rural Vermont, he makes water tubs by hand.
- Shangri-La to hell in ten years: How did Nepal, a peaceful landlocked country, become home to the most dramatic Maoist insurgency in modern history? Returned: Child Soldiers of Nepal's Maoist Army tells the personal story of Nepali boys and girls as they attempt to rebuild their lives after fighting a Maoist revolution. Through the voices of former child soldiers, the film examines why these children joined the Maoists and explores the prevention of future recruitment. The children describe their dramatic recruitment and participation in the Maoist People's Liberation Army during the eleven-year civil war between the Maoist insurgents and the Hindu monarch of Nepal. The girls' stories demonstrate how voluntarily joining the violent Maoist struggle became their only option to escape the gender discrimination and sexual violence of traditional Hindu culture in Nepal. With the major conflict ended and the Maoists in control of the government, these children are now discarded by the Maoist leadership and forced to return home to communities and families that want nothing to do with them. For many of the children of Nepal's Maoist Army, the return home can be even more painful than the experience of war.
- "I don't want to be Japanese!" filmmaker Matthew Hashiguchi recalls yelling at his father. Growing up Japanese-American in a predominantly white Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, Matthew wondered what made him different, why he stood out. Years later he set out to document his family's experiences of being Japanese in America before, during, and after World War II. GOOD LUCK SOUP explores several generations assimilating into a new culture while preserving their own.
- A loving daughter documents her reunion with her mentally-unstable mother in this heartfelt and decidedly personal documentary from filmmaker Tara Wray. When Wray was just a child, her mother was her entire life. A young girl with no father figure to speak of, Wray and her mother became so close that it was nearly impossible to distinguish where daughter ended and mother began. It was during those years, as the pair did their best to elude demons both real and imagined, that Wray first began to see signs of the powerful psychosis that would gradually cloud her mother's mind to the point of total insanity. After loving and protecting her increasingly unstable mother to the best of her abilities, Wray left home at the age of nineteen - when her mother threatened to kill her. Now, five years after that fateful threat, Wray returns to Manhattan, Kansas to re-establish her bond with her mentally disturbed mother, and perhaps help the ailing abstract artist locate the geographic center of the United States - a curious location that just may hold the secret to establishing world peace.
- This documentary made with an all native American crew by an indigenous Hopi director examines the representation of so called Indians in our films and in other media.
- Monir explores the life and practice of Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, one of the most innovative and influential artists working in the Middle East today.
- This film, shot in 1955, focuses on a small band of /Gwi San living in the arid landscape of the central Kalahari Desert in present-day Botswana.
- Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr. explores the complex relationships between humans, plants, animals, and ceremonies and the cycles of the earth, sun and moon within the universe from a Hopi, Maya, and Nahua perspective.
- This is one of the few ethnographic films in which the anthropologist appears as one of the subjects, and as such it is a lively introduction to the nature of fieldwork. Napoleon Chagnon, who lived among the Yanomamö for 36 months over a period of eight years, is shown in various roles as "fieldworker": entering a village armed with arrows and adorned with feathers; sharing coffee with the shaman Dedeheiwa who recounts the myth of fire; dispensing eyedrops to a baby and accepting in turn a shaman's cure for his own illness; collecting voluminous genealogies; making tapes, maps, Polaroid photos; and attempting to analyze such patterns as village fission, migration, and aggression. The commentary touches on the problems of the fieldworker (all the genealogies compiled in the first year were based on false data, and had to be discarded). Between the image and the commentary we also glimpse some of the ambiguities of the anthropologist's role and his relation to the subjects of his study, for example in the tension between mutual exploitation and reciprocity. The film complements Chagnon's book on his fieldwork, Studying the Yanomamö.
- The hopes, fears, and aspirations of adolescence are expressed in the close friendship of two Afghan boys, Naim and Jabar, in the Balkh Province in northern Afghanistan.
- For generations, Patua (Chitrakar) communities of West Bengal, India have been painters and singers of stories depicted in scrolls. In the past they used to receive food or money for their recital of Muslim and Hindu stories and folk myths. Unfortunately, competition from other media significantly eroded this way of life. In response to this cultural crisis and as a way to make extra money, a group of women from Naya formed a scroll painters' collaborative. They candidly discuss issues of Islam and birth control, victimization of women, female education, poverty and work, religious tolerance and intolerance, and depict some of these ideas in the scrolls. Their stories attest to what it means to be a woman in Bengal and India today, demonstrating how a small group of determined women can empower themselves by adapting an ancient art to new conditions.
- Fate of the Lhapa is a feature-length documentary about the last three Tibetan shamans living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal. Each lhapa requested that their story be filmed. Their fear was that the next heir might not appear until after their own deaths. Subsequently, with no lhapa alive to mentor the children, the documentary would be used to transmit the knowledge to the next generation. Their tales of nomadic childhoods, shamanic callings and apprenticeships, cosmologies of disease and treatments, and of their flight from Tibet during the Chinese occupation in the late 1950s is be juxtaposed with images of present-day life in the camp, current healing practices and shared concerns of the future and the fate of their tradition.
- Through the eyes of African filmmakers, an unforgettable portrait of Sierra Leone's heroes as they confront Ebola during the most acute public health emergency of modern times.
- A documentary in which an ax fight breaks out during a dispute between tribes in a Yanomami village.
- Heavy mist hangs over the towering Peruvian mountains as a young subsistence farmer, Feliciano, his wife Locrecia, and their small son Royer till their fertile land. Farming the fields above the Sacred Valley in southern Peru is all the indigenous people of Mullacas know - that and the taste of the local fermented corn beverage, chicha. Though theirs appears at first glance to be a peaceful life, isolation and lack of schooling have given rise to feelings of social inequality and an increase in alcoholism. So while he values the beauty of their surroundings, Feliciano wants his son, as his father wanted him, to move to the city so he can get an education and have a better life. Marking director Jason Burlage's feature debut, this moving documentary chronicles the young family's struggles through the planting season and Feliciano's more lucrative work as a porter along the Incan trails to Machu Picchu. These days, only a small percentage of indigenous Peruvians farm, as one in three members of the population now lives in Lima -sixty percent of whose residents occupy the slums. Yet among mountain communities, the belief that life is better in the city is widely held - and thus the traditions of "planting according to the stars," as their fathers and their fathers' fathers taught them, are slowly disappearing. The crucial practice known as ayni, for instance, or communal reciprocity in the form of such acts as plowing one another's fields, is being lost. Through such unsettling details, Burlage paints a vivid portrait of the complexities facing the future of rural communities throughout Peru.
- Describes the techniques and uses of mud bricks as building materials in Hadhramaut region of southeast Yemen. Discusses the stages of mud construction, its advantages over cement, and the value of lime waterproofing.
- 'Chaiqian' (demolition) is a portrait of urban space, migrant labor, and ephemeral relationships in the centre of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. Attending first to the formal dimensions of the transforming work-site - including the demands of physical labor and the relationship between human and machine - the film shifts focus to the social dynamics of a group of thirty people who have come from the countryside to work in this ever-changing urban landscape. In exploring the various banal yet striking interactions between these members of China's 'floating population', the city's residents, and the film-maker, 'Chaiqian' simultaneously expresses and resists the fleeting nature of urban experience.
- Shot in a variety of locations all over Turkey, Those Who Are In Love successfully conveys the emotion and beauty of traditional Anatolian village culture as it struggles with the process of modernization and change.
- "Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia, Volume 2: Neuropsychiatric Disorders" is the second half in a series of 6 ethnographic films on severe mental illness in Indonesia. The series is based on material drawn from 12 years of person-centered research by director and anthropologist Robert Lemelson. Volume 2 follows 3 individuals of different ages and backgrounds with neuropsychiatric disorders, and explores the relationship between culture, mental illness, and first-person experience. "The Bird Dancer" focuses on the social stigma of neuropsychiatric disorder and the human suffering it entails. "Family Victim" examines the bi-directional influences between an individual considered to have a disruptive or troublesome personality and his social world. "Kites and Monsters" follows a young Balinese from boyhood to manhood, discovering the influential and protective aspects of culture that may guide developmental neuropsychiatric processes.
- For the people of Mandak region, New Ireland,the most dramatic and complex ceremonial events are those surrounding death. The creation and presentation of the Malangan Labadama with its carved figures, masked dancers and feasting is the final tribute by three brothers to a deceased clansman and former leader.
- "Language is a weapon, it is not for shaving your armpits" says eminent writer Mahasweta Devi in this documentary about the her life and work. At the center of a half-century of tumultuous change, the lifetime of Mahasweta Devi has spanned the British period, Independence, and fifty years of post-colonial turmoil. Her writing has given Indian literature a new life and inspired two generations of writers, journalists and filmmakers. A celebrated writer and tireless activist for the last two decades, she has led a battled on the behalf of the De-notified tribes of India -indigenous groups who were branded "natural criminals" by the British colonial state, and who face discrimination to this day. Informal in style, this video explores how Mahasweta's daily life and writing is a part of her life as a tireless worker for the rights of the Tribal people's of India.
- In 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran brought a twenty-five-hundred-year history to a close for the Jews who left their homeland for America. Uncertain about their safety and fearing religious persecution in Khomeini's Islamic Theocracy, an estimated 80,000 of Iran's 100,000 Jews fled the country. This documentary tells the story of those Jews who reestablished a tight-knit community in Los Angeles. Iranian Jewish families and young adults take us through the details of their lives in the United States. The families retell how and why they left Iran, their struggles as Jews while in Iran, how they escaped by land across the Iranian border and how they have tenaciously tried to hold on to their heritage in the United States. We experience the difficulties young adults face being raised in traditional Iranian Jewish homes in America today.
- Presents an intimate portrait of several generations of women in a village family in India. Focuses on a grandmother in a Jat farm family in Haryana, and gives her viewpoint as well as those of her daughters-in-law.
- Shooting for Democracy brings together voices of students in the world's smallest emerging democracy with those in its most established. The film is a vibrant portrayal of two nations as seen through the youth in each country. Inspired by the coincidence of Bhutan's first democratic elections taking place during a US presidential election year, Shooting for Democracy follows high school students as they participate in a video education program. The result is a unique juxtaposition that examines youth perspectives on democracy during the 2008 elections. Combining professionally produced footage with excerpts from the students' work, the film follows personal experiences of the students while also exploring the social and political contexts of these distinct nations, now linked by their use of a democratic system.
- In Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), the cult of nat spirit worship has survived both the triumph of a devastating military dictatorship and the widespread adoption of Buddhism. At the center of the cult are the spirit mediums, often homosexual men, who communicate with the nats and take on their flamboyant characteristics in ecstatic rituals. Guided by two lively 70-year olds, director Lindsey Merrison explores the role of the spirit mediums in Burmese society in this fascinating documentary.
- In a mountain village in southwestern China, just south of Tibet, one of the last remaining traditional bearers of the Lisu ethnic group is amid the mountains of new changes seeping into every crevice of their lives. Will their tradition survive?
- The conflict between forestry and nature conservation in Finland has been constant during last 20 years. The traditional, freely grazing reindeer herding, dependent of the old forest growth , has been losing its resources but complaint and protests haven't been able to stop this process. In 2005 Saami reindeer herders made an alliance with Greenpeace and established a Forest Rescue Station in the wilderness of Inari. The international pressure from Greenpeace made Finnish forest company Stora Enso stop buying the wood from conflict areas. Kalevi Paadar, a Saami reindeer herder, lodged a complaint to the UN Human Rights Commission. He claimed that logging in his home village violated their right to continue their traditional way of reindeer herding based on free grazing. The UN asked Finland to stop logging. In 2007 Metsähallitus started logging again, this time in the wilderness of Kessi.
- The film concerns female excision which has long been a practice in various African cultures and has taken a variety of forms. In those European countries and more recently in the United States, which has seen a rise in immigration from formerly inaccessible areas of Africa, the term "female genital mutilation" or "excision" and it's practice by newly transplanted Africans within the context of European and American society, culture and law, has become contested ground. Anthropologists, many of whom have long been aware of the practice, are finding themselves in the center of the debate. BINTOU IN PARIS is an excellent introduction to the theme as we are able to understand the complex mix of the pressure to adhere to tradition, while dealing with the desires of a younger generation infused with a sense of female emancipation to conform to the roles and demands of a new culture with new laws and protections. While the film is acted, the inter familial relationships ring true, as do the circumstances the film constructs. The film enhances our understanding of a volatile topic without resorting to horrific images or descriptions.
- A filmmaker returns to visit the Ju/'hoansi in the Kalahari, 20 years after his involvement in a grass-roots development project.
- Sastun tells the compelling life story of American herbologist Rosita Arvigo's impassioned quest to find and preserve medicinal herbs in the rainforest of Belize before they are lost forever to deforestation.
- Educational film that provides insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by families in three contrasting communities in Costa Rica. Engaging personalities bring to life key community economic development issues, highlighting both sources of hope and of frustration. DVD includes Seven Special Features.