Documentary Educational Resources - Indigenous Studies / Arts, Craftwork, & Design / All Films

Following the Thread

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 15:16:10 GMT

Following the Thread
Buy Now: $295.00

Following the Thread provides a critical view of the delicate balance Indigenous communities of fabric makers face as they struggle to maintain age-old artisanal practices in a globalized market economy.

In the Peruvian Andes, textiles are omnipresent in the lives of indigenous people; they are both eminently practical and stunningly beautiful as generations of weavers have applied their creativity to invent techniques and designs found nowhere else in the world. Textiles still form a powerful part of identity. But this identity is at risk. Indigenous people still face racism on a daily basis. And a globalized market economy that produces cheap, machine-made products destroys respect and interest in the hand-made. Infringement on the intellectual rights of native peoples only makes this worse.

The Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC) was established by Andean weavers and their supporters to aid in the survival of Cusqueñan textile traditions and to provide support to the indigenous people who create them. This short film presents some of the communities affiliated with the Center and includes special celebrations and ceremonies, rituals with the animals (llamas and sheep), natural dying processes, weaving and knitting demonstrations, and much more.

Selected Screenings & Awards

Best Documentary Short, Berlin International Art Film Festival, 2022

Best Documentary Short, Roma Shorts Film Festival, 2022

Best Documentary Short, Miami Indie Film Awards, 2022

Best Documentary Short, San Diego Art Film Festival, 2022

Best Documentary Short, Santa Barbara Film Awards, 2022

Honorable Mention, Toronto International Women Film Festival, 2021

Semi-finalist, Berlin Shorts Award, Berlin Shorts Festival, 2022

Semi-finalist, Best Documentary Short, Dublin World Film Festival, 2022

International Manhattan Film Awards, 2022

Toronto Indie Shorts, 2022

8 & HalFilm Awards, 2022

Amsterdam Short Film Festival, 2021

Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, 2021

North Dakota Human Rights Film Festival and Summit, 2021

Tokyo Liftoff Festival, 2021

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Entretejido

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 09:02:00 GMT

Entretejido
Buy Now: $295.00

Peruvian alpaca wool has held an important place in the rich textile traditions of Andean highland communities for generations. Among today's cosmopolitan elite, the wool has attained the status of luxury item, enhanced by its manufacture at the hands of indigenous artisans and herders. From remote villages to the capital's fashion runways, the wool bridges Peru's rural, indigenous poor and the urban and global fashion world. This supply chain has become a site of development efforts to alleviate poverty and foster social inclusion within Peru’s high-fashion worlds.

Entretejido is an observational-ethnographic film that weaves together the different sites and communities involved in making alpaca wool fashions. Varying representations of indigeneity emerge out of these encounters, which both challenge and reproduce historically-rooted racism.

The film offers an immersive experience of the textures that constitute this supply chain from animal to runway. More than just a sensory experience, however, viewers are confronted with the ways in which everyday items such as clothing are entangled in the racial politics and contested histories of the nation.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Golden Remi Award, Best Culture and Ethnicity Short Documentary, Houston International Film Festival, 2017

Honorable Mention – Best Graduate Student Film, Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival, 2016

Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, 2017

La Paz International Film Festival, La Paz, Bolivia, 2017

Ethnografilm Festival, Paris, 2017

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'Are'are Music and Shaping Bamboo

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:18:00 GMT

'Are'are Music and Shaping Bamboo
Buy Now: $340.00

'Are'are Music (color, 141 min, 1979)

A fascinating documentation of the traditional musical culture of the 'Are'are people of the Solomon Islands, in the South-Western Pacific. The three LP records published after a first one-year field-research in 1969-70 were a "phenomenal surprise" (Garfias) as they revealed a completely unknown music (outside of the Solomon Islands) of an exceptional beauty and complexity in its instrumental and vocal polyphonies. It seemed to the researcher an absolute necessity to document visually what had been published on sound recordings, showing in detail all the playing techniques, body movements of performers, and spatial coordination of music ensembles and dancers. The documentary consists of a comprehensive inventory of all the twenty musical genres of the 'Are'are people and is structured according to native classification, along with explanations by master musician 'Irisipau.

Shaping Bamboo (color, 33 min, 1979)

For the 'Are'are people of the Solomon Islands, the most valued music is that of the four types of panpipe ensembles. With the exception of slit drums, all musical instruments are made of bamboo; therefore the general word for instruments and the music performed with them is "bamboo" ('au). This film shows the making of panpipes, from the cutting the bamboo in the forest to the making of the final bindings. The most important part of the work consists in shaping each tube to its necessary length. Most 'Are'are panpipe makers measure the length of old instruments before they shape new tubes. Master musician 'Irisipau, surprisingly, takes the measure using his body, and adjusts the final tuning by ear. For the first time we can see here how the instruments and their artificial equiheptatonic scale—seven equidistant degrees in an octave—are practically tuned.

Both films have been previously issued as the Society for Ethnomusicology Audiovisual Series no. 1.

“The film is a splendid introduction when seen once through, but it is far more profitable to see it again and again with the aid of the printed analytic materials, of course... In sum, Musique 'Are'are is both a tour de force and a marathon.”
— Peter Crowe, Ethnomusicology, 31(2), 1987

“It is difficult to resist superlatives when considering the entire volume of Hugo Zemp's 'Are'are work over the years....('Are'are Music and Shaping Bamboo) are a model of thoroughness, imagination, and cohesiveness, and will remain valuable even beyond their considerable eminence as ethnographic documentation of this particular culture.”
— Robert Garfias, Ethnomusicology, 40(1), 1996

“[Zemp's work on the 'Are'are, including the films] is the single most detailed documentation to date of any Melanesian music world... I can think of very few projects that deserve such praise.”
— Steven Feld, Oceania, June 1997

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Klaus Wachsman Prize, Society for Ethnomusicology, 1985 for Shaping Bamboo

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Caribou Kayak

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Caribou Kayak
Buy Now: $320.00

Otto Apsaktaun and Gino Akka are the last Inuit elders who know the secrets of making a unique Canadian boat built for the Arctic – the Netsilingmeot caribou-hunting kayak. With features like a wide cockpit and long, narrow shape, the kayaks were designed to enhance the speed and ease of hunting caribou, since hunters have little time once caribou are spotted in the water. In the summer of 2002, the elders invited the youth of their hamlet of Kugaaruk and a couple of southerners to join them at a remote tundra camp on Barrow Lake. Using a combination of traditional and modern techniques and materials, the group work ten twelve-hour days on the kayak construction. They also hunt, cook, play music, and teach the children Inuit traditions like the art of throat singing. While completing a pair of highly-crafted, beautiful kayaks, the elders also transmit and preserve their vanishing Inuit culture.

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Earl's Canoe

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Earl's Canoe
Buy Now: $320.00

We meet Earl Nyholm, a member of the Ojibwe Nation, as he walks through the woods on Madeleine Island, Wisconsin. He's looking for just the right birch tree to select for the bark which will be used in the making of a traditional Ojibwe canoe. He talks about the respect that the Ojibwe People have for nature and for the spirit of the particular tree used in the making of a canoe following the traditions that had been handed down through the generations. We are told that this spot is a good one for building this canoe as Madeline Island was a sacred place and a center for the Ojibwe Nation in earlier times.

We watch the entire process from peeling the bark from the tree to shaping the form of the canoe with heavy rocks and then the elegant stitching together of the canoe's parts. Earl tells us that artists have always depicted birch bark canoes with the distinctive white pattern of the bark on the outside. This is a myth, as they are actually made with the white, outer bark of the tree, on the inside of the canoe. While the task is arduous the work proceeds step by step with the help of other members of the Ojibwe Nation.

The excellent camerawork allows us to see in great detail the ingenious process. While it is not as easy as going down to the local sporting goods shop and picking up an aluminum model, there is the sense of satisfaction knowing that the materials and the process are integrated with the natural environment and provide a spiritual link to the past.

This program is suitable for all ages and will be very useful for anyone interested in canoe making, in the preserving of a Native American craft, in teaching Native American Studies, and anthropology.

A Traditional Ojibwe Craft was produced for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife Programs and Cultural Studies.

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Ika Hands

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:44:00 GMT

Ika Hands
Buy Now: $320.00

This 2008 Special Edition DVD includes:

The film Ika Hands (58 minutes)
A conversation with Octavio Paz (27 minutes)
Photo gallery featuring still images and journal entries read by Robert Gardner (14 minutes)

About the film:
In the highlands of Northern Colombia, the Ika live a strenuous and isolated life, economically dependent on small gardens and a handful of domestic animals. They are thought to be descendants of the Maya who fled from the turmoil of Central American High Civilization's warring states to the remote valleys of Colombia's Sierra Nevadas. The Ika still inhabit a spectacular but demanding terrain extending between five and fifteen thousand feet, an almost vertical geography through which they move with prodigious ease.

Their lives are filled with a multitude of tasks, which they perform with a rare dexterity and purpose. Their labors, though they belong to two quite separate realms - the practical and the spiritual - contribute equally to the well being of everyone. Both days and nights are long and arduous. Indeed, the central figure in Ika Hands, Mama Marco, is a man whose priestly calling is simply another career undertaken in addition to that of farmer and householder.

Ika society is the result of quite distinct cultural choices, of what seem to have been decisions by generations of individuals to persevere with tradition and to resist the compelling alternatives offered by a ubiquitous modernity.

About the conversation with Octavio Paz:
On Jan. 19, 1983, Robert Gardner was in Octavio Paz's library on the Paseo de la Reforma to talk about film and anthropology. With them was Robert Fulton who had come with Gardner to work on a long neglected film about Paz himself, a film that never materialized but of which this occasion and several other such scenes remain.

At this moment, Gardner was finishing Ika Hands. He wanted it to be about shamanism or at least the kind of magical practices for which the Ika were known. Going to Mexico to visit Paz was in tune with his belief in Paz as a person closer to being a shaman himself than anyone else he knew.

The idea was to invite Paz into the Ika world and also into his own concerns about how to represent that world: what can images tell us? Gardner hoped to do this by showing Paz parts of an early version of the film he was editing. The ensuing twenty odd minutes is the result of that experiment.

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In God's Places

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:44:00 GMT

In God's Places
Buy Now: $320.00

Iindawo Zikathixo – In God's Places traces the cultural legacy of the indigenous San (Bushmen) people in south-eastern Africa as it was shaped by the migration and interaction with Bantu and European peoples. Filmed in the Drakensburg Mountains in the Transkei, as well as in Lesotho and the northeastern Cape, the film features the indigenous rock art as a background against which the story of the Bushmen unfolds.

Bushmen hunter-gatherers were the first people to inhabit the southern African landscape. For thousands of years, they migrated over the Drakensberg foothills, following the wild animals they hunted and painted. Iindawo Zikathixo explores the cultural interaction that developed between the Bushmen, Xhosa and Sotho-speaking peoples, and exposes the merciless force with which European settlers dispossessed the Bushmen of their hunting and gathering grounds. Some aspects of Bushmen culture survived the genocide, and Iindawo Zikathixo investigates these through music, dance, oral history and traditional rituals in remote communities and those that intermarried with San and absorbed their cultural practices.

A central location of the film is the Inxu River Valley in the former Transkei, where the last known Bushman rock artist, Lindiso, lived, painted and made rain for the Xhosa-speaking Mpondomise until about 1930. The filmmakers visit Lindiso's painted shelter with his grandson, Maqulana and with Sipani Togu, an Mpondomise diviner of Bushman descent. Mr. Togu conducts rainmaking and other rituals he associates with the Bushmen in the painted rockshelters of the Inxu Valley.

Iindawo Zikathixo offers a snapshot of the persistence of Bushmen expressive forms and practices and will be of interest to all those concerned with southern African cultural heritage.

[Note: although some people featured in this film are shown touching rock art, this occurs in the traditional or ritual contexts and is not usually acceptable because touching damages the paintings. In the interests of conserving rock art, visitors to painted shelters are advised not to touch the rock art under any circumstances.]

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Kuo Hina E Hiapo

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:13:00 GMT

Kuo Hina E Hiapo
Buy Now: $295.00

Tapa cloth, or ngatu as it is called in Tonga, is cloth made from the bark of the mulberry tree. The inner bark is beaten into fine sheets and painted using traditional designs. After centuries of use, ngatu has literally become the fabric of Tongan society. In Tonga and throughout much of Polynesia, bark cloth has deep symbolic and ceremonial use. At birth, babies are swaddled in it. At marriage, newlyweds line their wedding bed, and at death, the departed are buried wrapped in it.

This documentary investigates the highly collaborative process of making ngatu and the organizations of women who carry on with the tradition. While the process continues to be passed on from generation to generation, there are signs of change as a cash economy begins to infiltrate Tongan life. Young people show less interest in such labor intensive endeavor in the face of the older generation's belief that this tradition will never die.

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!Kung Bushmen Hunting Equipment

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

!Kung Bushmen Hunting Equipment
Buy Now: $320.00

This film shows in detail all the pieces in the Ju/'hoan hunting kit and how each piece is made and used, from the collection of the raw materials to the final fabrication, including the preparation of poison arrows.

!Kung Bushmen Hunting Equipment was shot by John Marshall between 1951 and 1953; it was edited by Frank Galvin under Lorna Marshall's direction.

This film is part of the !Kung series.

Orthography Note
The group of people depicted in these films are the Ju/'hoansi, speakers of the Ju/'hoan language. Ju/'hoan is part of the !Kung language group; the term !Kung was previously used by the Marshall family and others to refer to Ju/'hoansi. Although the term is outdated, it has been retained here for the sake of consistency with John Marshall's previously published work. The films and their related printed materials also employ antiquated spellings of names and places. For current Ju/'hoan orthography, please see the Ju/'hoan - English Dictionary, compiled by Patrick Dickens and the Ju/'hoan Peoples Literacy Committee.

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Kama Wosi

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

Kama Wosi
Buy Now: $320.00

Traditional music of the Trobriand Islands is played on a variety of flutes, from simple curving stems to panpipes. Songs (wosi) are also an important part of Trobriand music, and although everyone may compose and sing, people with special talents are encouraged to develop their skills. A range of songs are filmed and translated here: gardening and sailing songs, kula trading songs, songs of love and enticement, of grief and mourning. The film also reveals glimpses of everyday and ritual life: villages, gardens (and their magic), exchange, harvest dances, children in the rain.

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