Tunniit: Retracing the Lines of Inuit Tattoos (2011)

Nanook of the North

This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.

Documentário Brasil Tupinambá

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Ainu Puri

Shigeki, one of the Ainu people of northern Japan, follows the traditions of his ancestors and teaches his son Motoki about their heritage. But how can old customs be revived after centuries of suppression?

One of Many

A woman with indiginous roots in her 40s goes on a trip into her past: When she was four years old she had been taken away from her mother by the canadian authorities, like many others. This is her very sad story as an example for many others.

Cree Hunters of Mistassini

An NFB crew filmed a group of three families, Cree hunters from Mistassini. Since times predating agriculture, this First Nations people have gone to the bush of the James Bay and Ungava Bay area to hunt. We see the building of the winter camp, the hunting and the rhythms of Cree family life.

Tawai: A Voice from the Forest

Explorer Bruce Parry visits nomadic tribes in Borneo and the Amazon in hope to better understand humanity's changing relationship with the world around us.

Our People Will Be Healed

Legendary documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin provides a glimpse of what action-driven decolonization looks like in Norway House, one of Manitoba's largest First Nation communities.

Kímmapiiyipitssini: The Meaning of Empathy

Follow filmmaker Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers as she creates an intimate portrait of her community and the impacts of the substance use and overdose epidemic. Witness the change brought by community members with substance-use disorder, first responders and medical professionals as they strive for harm reduction in the Kainai First Nation.

The Lost Children

After a plane crash, four indigenous children fight to survive in the Colombian Amazon using ancestral wisdom as an unprecedented rescue mission unfolds.

How to Build an Igloo

This classic short film shows how to make an igloo using only snow and a knife. Two Inuit men in Canada’s Far North choose the site, cut and place snow blocks and create an entrance--a shelter completed in one-and-a-half hours. The commentary explains that the interior warmth and the wind outside cement the snow blocks firmly together. As the short winter day darkens, the two builders move their caribou sleeping robes and extra skins indoors, confident of spending a snug night in the midst of the Arctic cold!

The Pearl Button

The ocean contains the history of all humanity. The sea holds all the voices of the earth and those that come from outer space. Water receives impetus from the stars and transmits it to living creatures. Water, the longest border in Chile, also holds the secret of two mysterious buttons which were found on its ocean floor. Chile, with its 2,670 miles of coastline and the largest archipelago in the world, presents a supernatural landscape. In it are volcanoes, mountains and glaciers. In it are the voices of the Patagonian Indigenous people, the first English sailors and also those of its political prisoners. Some say that water has memory. This film shows that it also has a voice.

Cholitas

Five Bolivian indigenous women share one goal: climbing the highest mountain in America.

The Last Igloo

Documentary that follows a lone Inuit as he hunts, fishes and constructs an igloo, a way of life threatened by climate change.

Deep Roots

Lonnie Kauk’s personal journey to honor his indigenous Yosemite roots, and to connect with his legendary father by repeating his iconic climbs.

Still We Rise

50 years on, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy is the oldest continuing protest occupation site in the world. Taking a fresh lens this is a bold dive into a year of protest and revolutionary change for First Nations people.

Monica in the South Seas

Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.

Twice Colonized

Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter has long fought for the rights of her people. When her son suddenly dies, Aaju embarks on a journey to reclaim her language and culture after a lifetime of whitewashing and forced assimilation. But can she both change the world and mend her own wounds?

Povo da Floresta

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Nalujuk Night

Nalujuk Night is an up close look at an exhilarating, and sometimes terrifying, Labrador Inuit tradition. Every January 6th from the dark of the Nunatsiavut night, the Nalujuit appear on the sea ice. They walk on two legs, yet their faces are animalistic, skeletal, and otherworldly. Snow crunches underfoot as they approach their destination: the Inuit community of Nain. Despite the frights, Nalujuk Night is a beloved annual event, showing that sometimes it can be fun to be scared. Rarely witnessed outside of Nunatsiavut, this annual event is an exciting chance for Inuit, young and old, to prove their courage and come together as a community to celebrate culture and tradition. Inuk filmmaker Jennie Williams brings audiences directly into the action in this bone-chilling black and white short documentary about a winter night like no other.

The Last Ice

For centuries, Inuit in the Arctic have lived on and around the frozen ocean. Now, as climate change is rapidly melting the sea ice between Canada and Greenland, the outside world sees unprecedented opportunity. Oil and gas deposits, faster shipping routes, tourism, and fishing all provide financial incentive to exploit the newly opened waters. But for more than 100,000 Inuit, an entire way of life is at stake. Development here threatens to upset the delicate balance between their communities, land, and wildlife. Divided by aggressive colonization and decades of hardship, Inuit in Canada and Greenland are once again coming together, fighting to protect what will remain of their world. The question is, will the world listen?

Seven Songs from the Tundra

An anthology of stories about the indigenous Nenet peoples of the Northern Russian tundra, and how their way of life was disrupted by the advent of Soviet power.

Red Fever

Red Fever is a witty and entertaining feature documentary about the profound -- yet hidden -- Indigenous influence on Western culture and identity. The film follows Cree co-director Neil Diamond as he asks, “Why do they love us so much?!” and sets out on a journey to find out why the world is so fascinated with the stereotypical imagery of Native people that is all over pop culture. Why have Indigenous cultures been revered, romanticized, and appropriated for so long, and to this day? Red Fever uncovers the surprising truths behind the imagery -- so buried in history that even most Native people don't know about them.

We Were Children

For over 130 years till 1996, more than 100,000 of Canada's First Nations children were legally required to attend government-funded schools run by various Christian faiths. There were 80 of these 'residential schools' across the country. Most children were sent to faraway schools that separated them from their families and traditional land. These children endured brutality, physical hardship, mental degradation, and the complete erasure of their culture. The schools were part of a wider program of assimilation designed to integrate the native population into 'Canadian society.' These schools were established with the express purpose 'To kill the Indian in the child.' Told through their own voices, 'We Were Children' is the shocking true story of two such children: Glen Anaquod and Lyna Hart.

You Are on Indian Land

The territory of Akwesasne straddles the Canada-U.S. border. When Canadian authorities prohibited the duty-free cross-border passage of personal purchases - a right established by the Jay Treaty of 1794 - Kanien'kéhaka protesters blocked the international bridge between Ontario and New York State.

Grape Soda in the Parking Lot

Taqralik Partridge asks what if every language that had been lost to English — every word, every syllable — grew up out of the ground in flowers? Taqralik’s grandmother’s Scottish Gaelic and her father’s Inuktitut unfold in memories of her family, of pain, and of love.

Savages: The Story of Human Zoos

For more than a century the great colonial powers put human beings, taken by force from their native lands, on show as entertainment, just like animals in zoos; a shameful, outrageous and savage treatment of people who were considered subhuman.

Eami

Eami means ‘forest’ in Ayoreo. It also means ‘world’. The story happens in the Paraguayan Chaco, the territory with the highest deforestation rate in the world. 25,000 hectares of forest are being deforested a month in this territory which would mean an average of 841 hectares a day or 35 hectares per hour. The forest barely lives and this only due to a reserve that the Totobiegosode people achieved in a legal manner. They call Chaidi this place which means ancestral land or the place where we always lived and it is part of the "Ayoreo Totobiegosode Natural and Cultural Heritage". Before this, they had to live through the traumatic situation of leaving the territory behind and surviving a war. It is the story of the Ayoreo Totobiegosode people, told from the point of view of Asoja, a bird-god with the ability to bring an omniscient- temporal gaze, who becomes the narrator of this story developed in a crossing between documentary and fiction.

Kanehsatake, 270 Years of Resistance

In July 1990, a dispute over a proposed golf course to be built on Kanien’kéhaka (Mohawk) lands in Oka, Quebec, sets the stage for a historic confrontation that would grab international headlines and sear itself into the Canadian consciousness.

Through These Eyes

A 1970s American elementary school program encouraging students to figure out for themselves the universal building blocks of human community — family, work, faith, etc. — inflamed political sensitivities so intensely it was shelved and forgotten. Archive footage of the documentary film series at the program's core, classroom exchanges, and the ensuing controversy frames larger issues of education, politics and ideology.

Okimah

This documentary focuses on the goose hunt, a ritual of central importance to the Cree people of the James Bay coastal areas. Not only a source of food, the hunt is also used to transfer Cree culture, skills, and ethics to future generations. Filmmaker Paul M. Rickard invites us along with his own family on a fall goose hunt, so that we can share in the experience.

La folie du tatouage

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The Lost Colony of Roanoke: New Evidence

In 1587, more than 100 English colonists settle on Roanoke Island and soon vanish, baffling historians for centuries; now, experts use the latest forensic archaeology to investigate the true story behind America's oldest and most controversial mystery.

Angry Inuk

With "sealfies" and social media, a new tech-savvy generation of Inuit is wading into the world of activism, using humour and reason to confront aggressive animal rights vitriol and defend their traditional hunting practices. Director Alethea Arnaquq-Baril joins her fellow Inuit activists as they challenge outdated perceptions of Inuit and present themselves to the world as a modern people in dire need of a sustainable economy.