Horizontes de piedra (1956)

Moana

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."

Las Hurdes, país de leyenda

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.

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?

Creature Catalogue

Plot unavailable

Ghostland: The View of the Ju'Hoansi

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. The Ju/Hoansi Bushmen in Namibia are not allowed to hunt anymore and need to converge with our so called “civilized” lifestyle. For the first time the Ju/Hoansi Bushmen travel through the Kalahari and then right into the heart of Europe. What starts as a look at their fascinating culture becomes an even more fascinating look at our Western lifestyle. A warm and humorous reflection of our habits through the eyes of people who are about to give up their million year old traditions.

Savage Memory

Founding father of Anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski's work raises powerful and disturbing questions today. This is a look at his legacy and the imprints it has made on the generations that followed.

Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti

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.

Forest of Bliss

Forest of Bliss is an unsparing yet redemptive account of the inevitable griefs, religious passions and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, India's most holy city. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue. It is an attempt to give the viewer a wholly authentic, though greatly magnified and concentrated, sense of participation in the experiences examined by the film.

Journey Through Setomaa

Estonia's first ethnographic film. Made by Johannes Pääsuke in 1913 on his expedition to Setomaa, the South-Eastern region in Estonia.

The Lyrical Rongdanis

A musical documentary woven around the endangered musical culture of the Rangdani Rabhas from Manikganj, Meghalaya, North East India.

The Bounty Hunter of Mongolia

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 brave horseman, relentlessly pursues them through the Mongolian taiga, bordering Siberia.

Germaine chez elle

In front of Jean Rouch's camera, Germaine Dieterlen recalls her ethnographic itinerary, at the Musée de l'Homme, in Mali and in the Paris of the 1930s.

Days after

In Isère, in the mountainous region of Trièves, is the Tournesol farm, an experiential farm totally autonomous in energy, a veritable laboratory for renewable energies. Jean-Philippe and his family live there from sheep farming and organic market gardening. But in September 2017, a violent fire destroyed the farm and its facilities. While the family has lost everything, a surge of solidarity is taking place so that the Tournesol farm is reborn from its ashes.

Germaine et ses copains

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 half-blind old man. She recounts her memories of a past party at which Amadigné worked with her as an informant. Later, in front of the cliff, Germaine, Djamgouno and Pangalé are sitting on rocks, and Germaine talks about the many caves that can be visited by climbing small spelunking ladders. Rouch intervenes during the interview, asking the protagonists about the settlement of the cliff by the Dogon, who learned from the Tellem how to climb the cliff. Rouch then asks about the Tellem's predecessors who lived there 2,400 years ago. Germaine admits the ignorance of researchers on the subject, and Rouch concludes by joking about the new task that now falls to Germaine Dieterlen.

Hommage à Marcel Mauss. Germaine Dieterlen

Germaine Dierterlen talks about Dogon mythology at a conference on the Bandiagara cliffs. The Songo canopy is a sacred site in Bandiagara. Its walls are covered with paintings depicting the different phases of creation. A little further on, in a cave near the village of Bongo, symposium participants are discussing the Tellem, the people who lived in the houses built into the cliffs before the arrival of the Dogon. The archaeological remains and migratory movements of these two peoples are discussed.

Behind the Shadows

The Greek shadow puppetry began 130 years ago. A student of Greek shadow puppetry travels to China, where shadow puppetry began over 2000 years ago. There he follows Chinese shadow puppeteer master He Shihong in Wushan of China. Watching his performances and listening to him talk about his art and his career in it, many parallels are drawn and he expresses them by including his Greek shadow puppetry teacher in the film. This documentary is a cultural bridge between Greece and China through the art of shadow puppetry.

Horendi

The title of this film translates literally as 'to put on a hori,' a hori being the Songhay term for ceremony of festival. Here it is used to refer to a ganandi, literally 'to make dance' This film concerns two women whom the zima [priest] had diagnosed some months before as being ill through possession by spirits. In the meantime, their families have gathered together the resources to pay for the musicians, dancers, and the priest himself to put on an initiation dance lasting seven days This is a film of documentation, simply recording various moments in the progress of the ceremony, without any form of explanation, neither in intertitle cards nor in voice-over. (Paul Henley, The Adventure of the Real)

Hampi

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 ceremony featuring possession dances. With this film, Jean Rouch continues his ethnological and cinematographic study of Songhay ritual objects. He demonstrates that, in a particular context, the transfer of a hampi vase to a museum requires the organization of a ritual ceremony to obtain the gods' approval. At the time, however, reservations about filming a possession dance for the opening of a shrine in a museum made the move "questionable from a museological point of view".

Pam Kuso Kar (Breaking Pam's Vases)

In February 1974, Pam Sambo Zima, the oldest of the priests of possession in Niamey, Niger, died at the age of seventy-plus years. In his backyard, the followers from the possession cult symbolically break the dead priest's ritual vases and cry for the deceased while dividing up the clothes of the divinities.

A Loyal Overseas Chinese Family

Plot unavailable

Crimson Moon

Crown Prince Sado spirals down due to his own insanity and his father King Yeongjo's complex.

Silence... Can You Hear It?

When Pooja, the daughter of retired Justice Chaudhary, is found murdered under mysterious circumstances, ACP Verma is roped in to investigate this high-profile case. When everyone is hiding the truth, justice will thrive despite the silence.

Ayar

Ayar, a first-generation American Latina, returns home to reunite with her daughter. But when her mother, Renata, refuses to let her see her due to Covid, Ayar is confronted by the many roles she’s been forced to play, including the role in this film.

Trapped

Trapped revolves around a number of women from different walks of life whose destinies are tied together; being all under one siege. As the events unfold, their own personal stories reflect on a far bigger siege that depicts the shackles imposed by a patriarchal society.

What She Likes

An emotional coming-of-age drama centered around Andou Jun, a gay student who is not out. He accepts a confession from his fujoshi classmate Miura Sae and they start dating. However, Jun is also seeing Makoto, but fails to tell Sae about his male lover.

Too Far From Home

19-year-old Morgane puts her studies on hold and moves to Amsterdam to work as an Au Pair for a French family. Eager to stretch her wings and experience new things, the young girl throws herself into her new job taking care of two young children. But Morgane's parents are worried about their daughter's delicate health and the unforthcoming nature of her beguiling employers. The young girl is rattled by the uneasiness that reigns over the eerie house where the family lives, and soon discovers that their last Au Pair disappeared in strange circumstances. All alone in a foreign land and unable to speak the language, Morgane finds herself sinking into a trap. She'll have to fit together all the pieces of the puzzle fast, to save her own skin.

Spring in Moscow

The positive assessment of the work of young historian Nadezhda Kovrova went to her head. Confident in her infallibility, she makes a mistake.

Nem Todas As Manhãs São Iguais

Ana and her father Luís return to grandma’s house. Memories, pain and longing are experienced and questioned by the girl based on her perception of life and death.

Snow Leopard

A snow leopard breaks into the sheep pen of a nomad and kills nine rams. Father and son then argue: the son insists on killing the snow leopard, but the father insists on releasing it.

The Distance

Yashar has returned to Iran after few years to give a news for his friend's family, Unaware that they have news for him.

The Marginalized

Michèle, in her fifties, is homeless and lives at Orly airport where she leads a hard and lonely life. Theo, a mentally handicapped young man, works at the airport and lives with his "Auntie" who has been overprotecting him since he was abandoned by his mother. When Michèle decides to find her son in Lisbon, Theo naively agrees to drive her there, but what she doesn't know is that he only has a car without a license... They then embark on an adventure on the country roads, making us follow people we don't look at, on roads we never take.

The Diabetic

Like a mumblecore for invisible disability, The Diabetic follows a lonely and irreverent 30 year old Type 1 Diabetic named Alek who returns to his hometown to re-live his teenage 'glory days.' Upon arrival in suburbia he finds that most of his old friends have moved away, started a family, or simply grown up. Only one person responds to his invitation: Matt, an old acquaintance who has never moved away from the suburbs. Matt represents everything that Alek despises about suburban life; the banal, boring, and uncultured. Unwilling to give up on his nostalgic dreams, Alek parties with Matt, launching them into a hallucinatory and directionless fugue through the dark streets of suburbia. Throughout the seemingly never-ending night and as Alek’s blood sugars become more erratic, he pushes Matt and their adventure to darker and darker places with complete disregard for their well-being.