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."

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

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

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...

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

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...

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

In Isère, in the mountainous region of Trièves, is the Tournesol farm, an experiential farm totally autonomous in energy, a veritable laboratory for r...

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. The film...

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 disa...

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...

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...

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...

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

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 y...

This documentary started as part of a photography project about the indigenous Ainu population in northern Japan, portraying people from tightly knit...

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

A unique 'direct cinema' feature length documentary (no narration or interviews) originally filmed in the Spring of 1970 and concluded during the Summ...

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...

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