AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.
After his father dies, law student Adolfo (Jorge Marchand), returns to his native village in the South of Bolivia, where he falls in love with Claudina Silvia Arévalo, a beautiful chola girl nicknamed La Chaskañawi, which means "girl with big eyes" in Quechua. Falling under her spell, Adolfo forgets about his fiancee in the city, abandons his law studies, and succumbs to alcohol. Based on the 1947 novel La Chaskañawi.
In Cerro Bayo, a mountainous region of Patagonia on the Chilean border, a Kolla Indian falls in love with a girl from another village. His mother disapproves the relationship and hates the woman. When the girl becomes pregnant with his baby, he must travel to find better work, leaving her alone with the mother's wrath.
Rye, a photographer, and Chris, a political science student, are in their final year of college, and have lived together in the same house for three years. While their bond has grown increasingly stale since first moving in together, they’re tethered by a common history and lingering grief; they know the house and its traumas in ways none of its few rotating tenants ever can. Set in the politically charged recent past at Hampshire College - an alternative school without grades or majors - the film's protagonists struggle with the demands of communal living and the concentrated emotions that come with it, against a backdrop of mass protests, long winters, creative passions, and armchair philosophy.
The young goat herders from the cliff of Bandiagara practice on the stone drums of their ancestors. An ethnomusicological film experiment describing the subtle plays of the right and left hand of Dogon drummers.
For months filmmaker Thierry Knauff lived with the Cameroonian tribe, the Baka. This is his document of that time.
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.
As retailers, wholesalers, and negotiators, Asante women of Ghana dominate the huge Kumasi Central Market amid the laughter, argument, colour and music. The crew of this `Disappearing World' film have jumped into the fray, explored, and tried to explain the complexities of the market and its traders. As the film was to be about women traders, an all female film crew was selected and the rapport between the two groups of women is remarkable. The relationship was no doubt all the stronger because the anthropologist acting as advisor to the crew, Charlotte Boaitey, is herself an Asante. The people open up for the interviewers telling them about their lives as traders, about differences between men and women, in their perception of their society and also about marriage.
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 Extremadura, in 1922.
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 footage, so this “finished” version was made by Teiji Ito and Cherel Ito after Deren’s death.
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."