Residence
This is the story of Dona Virginia, an elderly woman who awaits the expropriation of her house. Year after year, the government threatens to destroy the place, her past and her memories.
The Life and Times of Sara Baartman
In 1810, 20 year old Sara Baartman got on a boat from Cape Town to London, unaware that she would never see her home again, or that she would become the icon of racial inferiority and black female sexuality for the next 100 years. Four years later, she became the object of scientific research that formed the bedrock of European ideas about BFS. She died the next year, but even after her death, Sara remained an object of imperialist scientific investigation. In the name of Science, her sexual organs and brain were preserved and displayed in the Musee de l'Homme in Paris until as recently as 1985. Using historical drawings, cartoons, legal documents, and interviews with noted cultural historians and anthropologists, this documentary deconstructs the social, political, scientific, and philosophical assumptions that transformed one young woman into a representation of savage sexuality and racial inferiority.
La importancia de llamarse Avelino García
Avelino Chillarón was 12 or 13 years old when he realized that his surnames and those of his cousins didn't match, so he decided to ask his uncle. This is how he learned that, although his father and aunt were siblings, they didn't have the same father, so he and his cousins didn't share the same grandfather. In this way, Avelino realized that there was a part of his family he didn't know. The protagonist of this story feels partially mutilated from a part of his family history, a part that was taken away from him by a regime that established, over the years, a long period of widespread social amnesia about a series of corpses and missing persons throughout the spanish geography.
The Winds of the Milky Way
Sequel to the "The Waterfowl People". The author interprets the kinship, linguistic and cultural relationships of the Finno-Ugric peoples. Finns, Vepsians, Votes, Setos, Erzya-Mordvinians, Mansi, Hungarians, Sami, Nganasans, and Estonians appear in the film. The film was shot in 1977 on location in northern Finland, Sapmi, Vepsia, Votia, Mordovia, Khantia-Mansia, Hungary, the Taymyr Peninsula, the Setomaa region in Estonia, and on the Estonian islands of Saaremaa and Muhu. Footage was also shot in 1970 in the Nenets Okrug. The second documentary in Lennart Meri's "Encyclopaedia Cinematographica Gentium Fenno - Ugricarum" series.
Burden of Dreams
The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dragging a huge steamboat up a mountain, while Herzog embraces the path of a certain madness to make his vision come true.
African Spirit
A celebration of the diversity of Ethiopia's culture and wildlife. It journeys from North to South - spanning mountains, rainforests and the hottest place on Earth. It documents Muslims mixing with Christians as they have for over a millennia and the 'honey people' of the forest, filmed here for the first time. Visually stunning and unsentimental, this is Ethiopia as you've never seen it before.
Museo
Mexico, 1985. Juan and Wilson, two perennial Veterinary students, perpetrate an audacious heist in the National Museum of Anthropology, running away with a loot of more than hundred invaluable pieces of Mayan art, unaware of the consequences of their outrageous act.
Paralelo 10
It portrays a pioneering and risky work carried out in a small Xinane base, by FUNAI, near Parallel 10º South, west of Acre, on the border with Peru. In simple installations, in the middle of the jungle, the sertanista José Carlos Meirelles carries out the difficult mission of protecting the isolated Indians of the region, with the help of anthropologist Terri Aquino. With few resources, specialists perform their tasks tirelessly. In addition to carrying out a permanent negotiation with the riverside populations in the area, they also deal with the confrontation with traffickers and squatters who try to invade it.
Baobab Play
Children and teenagers throw sticks, berries, and leaves at each other from perches in a large baobab tree.
Stone and bag
The film delves into the work processes of an archaeological team from the Aranzadi Science Society at the San Adrián Tunnel site. Interspersing this observation with archival materials, the film explores the relationships between archaeology and museography, as well as the different ways in which these two practices produce the displacement of objects.
Global Metal
In GLOBAL METAL, directors Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn set out to discover how the West's most maligned musical genre - heavy metal - has impacted the world's cultures beyond Europe and North America. The film follows metal fan and anthropologist Sam Dunn on a whirlwind journey through Asia, South America and the Middle East as he explores the underbelly of the world's emerging extreme music scenes; from Indonesian death metal to Chinese black metal to Iranian thrash metal. GLOBAL METAL reveals a worldwide community of metalheads who aren't just absorbing metal from the West - they're transforming it - creating a new form of cultural expression in societies dominated by conflict, corruption and mass-consumerism.
The Waterfowl People
A documentary about the histoy and linguistic ties of the Finno-Ugric, and Samoyedic peoples. Speakers of the Kamassian, Nenets, Khanty, Komi, Mari, and Karelian languages were filmed in their everyday settings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The footage was shot in Altai Krai, the Nenets Okrug, Khantia-Mansia, Uzbekistan, the Komi Republic, Mari el, Karelia, and Estonia. The first documentary in Lennart Meri's "Encyclopaedia Cinematographica Gentium Fenno - Ugricarum (1970 - 1997)" series.
The Naked Ape
Somewhat based on Desmond Morris's fascinating book of pop anthropology, this partially animated satirical docudrama produced by Playboy Magazine publisher Hugh Hefner, traces the evolution of human kind and offers insight into the reasons why we behave the way we do. Though often dealing with sexuality, nothing in the film is terribly offensive or graphic. A prime example of mainstream experimental film-making from the early 70's featuring a young and breathtakingly lovely Victoria Principal.
Le Grand Entretien avec Philippe Descola
American Hardcore
Inspired by Steven Blush's book "American Hardcore: A tribal history" Paul Rachman's feature documentary debut is a chronicle of the underground hardcore punk years from 1979 to 1986. Interviews and rare live footage from artists such as Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, SS Decontrol and the Dead Kennedys.
The Fox Family
The Kumiho family circus in town -- and with it, apparently, a mysterious murderer. The members of motherless family aren’t helping their case with their strange remarks about humans and their initial performances, cavalcades of dismemberment and torrents of blood which terrify the local kids. Pretty soon, a dour, downbeat cop is on the tail of the plucky, bumbling Kumihos. Or rather, tails -- “kumiho” is the word for the fox spirits of Korean mythology, and this clan from Nam Mountain near Seoul, temporarily disguised as people thanks to a magic spell, must eat human livers during a brief, once-in-a-millennium lunar eclipse to shed their foxy nature and assume permanent human form. When the sleazy reprobate on the run from mobsters stumbles into their eerie household, he soon finds himself a little too enthusiastically involved in their scheming after human flesh—and involved with the sexy elder-sister fox spirit as well!
Race Memories
Denton, an anthropologist of note, meets by accident a new neighbor, an attractive girl, whose father insists upon her marriage to a man whom he favors because of his wealth. Denton and the girl are mutually attracted and to Denton comes a vague but haunting belief that they have met before. Worn out by overstudy, he becomes seriously ill with rain fever and the mind pictures he has of his fair neighbor fade into a vision of a prehistoric existence, where he wanders as a stone age savage, meets and loves the girl of his heart, who also lives in that strange world. There also is the conflict between wealth and poverty, the father's choice opposed to the daughter's. The prehistoric Denton finally wins out after struggling with a savage rival and wild beasts as well. Just so the modern Denton finally conquers over his modem rival.
The Sea Stares at Us from Afar
Huelva, Spain, an isolated region lost in time. The grass, the sand and the sky are the same that those foreigners saw in the spring of 1895, when they crossed the sea from a distant country to mark the unspoiled terrain and extract its wealth, when the tower was new, when people could climb to the top of the highest dune and imagine that the city of Tartessos was still there, in the distance, almost invisible in the morning brume.
Bamboo Theatre
This film is a portrait of unique cultural space for Spirits, Gods and People. While permanent theatres are commonly built in most cosmopolitan modern cities, Hong Kong preserves a unique theatrical architecture, a Chinese tradition that has lasted more than a century - Bamboo Theatre.
The Shaman
"Shaman" was filmed on July the 16th, 1977 in the northernmost corner of Eurasia, on the Taymyr Peninsula, at the Avam river, concurrently with the shooting of the documentary "The Winds of the Milky Way". The Nganasan Shaman Demnime (1913-1980) was 64 years old at the time. The documentary about Demnime's incarnation ritual was completed 20 years later. The fifth and final documentary in Lennart Meri's "Encyclopaedia Cinematographica Gentium Fenno - Uricarum" series.