Ethnographic Film Movies

A seven-day initiation ceremony is documented in which two women undergo ritual healing following a diagnosis of spirit possession, presented without...

An autistic documentary filmmaker studies two neurotypicals, trying to understand their shared way of being through objects, language and small...

A documentary portrait of life in the Cook Islands, focusing on Rarotonga and neighboring islands. The film records traditional fishing, weaving,...

A young woman achieves cone consciousness.

In Sangha, through the window of her house, Germaine greets Djamgouno, her main informant. He then translates for her a conversation she has with 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...

Biopic of Ceferino Namuncurá (1886-1905), son of a Mapuche cacique and a white woman, and the first Indian of South America to be beatified....

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

For months filmmaker Thierry Knauff lived with the Cameroonian tribe, the Baka. This is his document of that time.

Portrays the Nuer, Nilotic herdsmen of the Nile basin. Shows how their daily lives revolve about their cattle, and depicts the psychological bonds...

In the South Seas, Samoan village life is portrayed with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a romanticized 'Gauguin idyll', the film...

A ritual vase, the hampi, is placed in the center of the Musée de plein air de la République du Niger in Niamey, during a ritual...

The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed...

A young student heads back to his village during the COVID-19 lockdown to collect ethnographic material for his thesis, but as quarantine stretches...

A collage of daily life in Aq Kupruk builds from the single voice that calls the townspeople to prayer, the brisk exchange of the baazar, communal...

The film follows a group of Nenets women gathering firewood in a snow-covered tundra. This film is part of a larger Yamal Nenets Series, which...

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

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

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...