Documentary Educational Resources - Geography / North America / Canada / All Films

One Man's Journey series

Wed, 5 Sep 2018 11:07:00 GMT

One Man's Journey series
Buy Now: $705.00

One Man's Journey is a three-part series featuring naturalist/explorer/filmmaker Robert Perkins paddling his canoe through his personal and geographic journeys. All three films were broadcast on WGBH in the winter of 2005.

“One Man's Journey... is an adventure story, but not the kind with bravado or derring-do. Instead, it's the contemplative, solitary kind... Much of the film consists of radiant nature shots narrated by Mr. Perkins as he reflects on the meaning of life... the movie is also unexpectedly stirring, informed by Mr. Perkins's considerable, if dark, charm, and the beauty of the remote landscapes he is drawn to. (The film's) meditative style becomes hypnotic...”
— New York Times

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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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Dances of the Kwakiutl

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Dances of the Kwakiutl
Buy Now: $295.00

Dances of the Kwakiutl is composed of fragments filmed in 1950 in Fort Rupert, British Columbia. They were made during a performance by those still familiar with the tradition of 'Hamatsa' or cannibal dancing. This type of dance was brought to impressive artistic heights by the Kwakiutl people of the Northwest coast.

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Fishing at the Stone Weir

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Fishing at the Stone Weir
Buy Now: $320.00

Fishing at the Stone Weir

Part 1 (30 min)

Full summer, and the tundra is bare; skin tents are up and it is time to attend to the fishing as the fish move upstream. The men are in the river, lifting stones and placing them to form enclosures to trap the fish. A woman skins a duck and then braids her hair in the old way, stiffly around sticks. From a bladder she makes a balloon for the child. The men are fishing with the three-pronged leisters, spearing the fish and stringing them on a thong, until it is as much as a man can do to drag his catch from the water. The woman works quickly, cleaning the fish, and then all enjoy bits of the fresh raw fish.

Part 2 (27 min)

There are many men fishing now and even the children on shore imitate the motions of the men. Rain sweeps over the tundra but the work goes on, the men splashing through the weir, furs hitched high, seemingly little affected by the cold water. The haul is large. A man makes fire with a bowdrill and soon there is a blaze under the stone cooking pot. Fish are stewed and eaten, the men staying in their own group. There is a little play at cat's cradle while stories are told, and then the women return to cleaning fish and the men to building stone caches to store and protect the plentiful harvest for the leaner days to come.

Films in the Netsilik series

At The Autumn River Camp
At The Caribou Crossing Place
At The Spring Sea Ice Camp
At The Winter Sea Ice Camp

Building a Kayak

Fishing at the Stone Weir

Group Hunting on the Spring Ice

Jigging for Lake Trout

Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice

About the Netsilik series

These films reveal the live reality of traditional Inuit lifebefore the European acculturation. The Netsilik of the Pelly Bay regionin the Canadian Arctic had long lived apart from other people and haddepended entirely on the land and their own ingenuity to sustain lifethrough the rigors of the Arctic year.

The filming was done during the summers of 1963 and 1964 and in the late winter of 1965 under the ethnographic direction of Dr. AsenBalikci of the University of Montréal, assisted by Guy Mary-Rousseliere, O.M.I., both anthropologists of wide Arctic experience. Quentin Brownwas Producer-Director, and Kevin Smith the Executive Producer for theseries. A minimum of cultural reconstruction was required during thefilming; the Netsilik families readily agreed to live in the old wayonce more and showed considerable aptitude in recalling and representing the earlier ways of life.

Note on Term "Eskimo":

The films in this series make use of the name "Eskimo." While once broadly applied, it is a perjorative term and considered offensive. While the inception of the word is a matter of debate, it is no longer used or applied in our film catalog. The context in which the term appears in this series is an acknowledged relic of a colonial past, presented in its original version. DER apologizes for any offense caused.

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For Our Street Family

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

For Our Street Family
Buy Now: $295.00

Revolving around a teen drop-in center called Planet Youth, the film explores the pain of stereotypes, the importance of peer support, and the ambivalence towards identity experience by a group of First Nations teens in Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

Begun as a participatory photography group self-portrait, the film expands to capture the youths' difficult challenges with racism, abuse, and foster care, while exploring the teens' resilient playfulness and why they are a "street family." For Our Street Family provides the opportunity to finally listen to a group parented by bureaucracy and ignored by the public.

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Home Waters

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Home Waters
Buy Now: $320.00

Home Waters documents naturalist Robert Perkins' five-week journey down the length of the Connecticut River, from the Canadian border to Long Island Sound. Full of humor, adventure and insight, the one-hour film paints a stunning portrait of New England in autumn, and captures the spirit of the river, and the people who live, work and take pleasure on it.

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Group Hunting on the Spring Ice

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:26:00 GMT

Group Hunting on the Spring Ice
Buy Now: $340.00

Group Hunting on the Spring Ice

Part 1 (34 min)

Late June, and much of the land is bare. There are sounds of running water, and melt ponds shine everywhere. The woman carries heather and moss to camp and the man makes a whirling bullroarer for the boy. Another child pretends to drive a dog sled. A woman is working sinews into bowstrings, while another is busy with a seal skin. A woman prepares to cook a meal and a man makes a bow from bone and sinews. It is a demanding task to combine such materials into a strong supple weapon; the result is pleasing to the man. The next day the men move out on the sea ice with a dog to look for seal pups.

Part 2 (28 min)

The men are out on the sea ice and the women work at the tasks of camp. Seal skins are pegged to dry in the sun and a woman, baby on her back, picks over a pile of gulls. The birds are skinned and then go into the pot with water from a melt pond. A baby sucks on a bone. The people eat, and then the women visit an old man in his tent. Now the women are out gathering moss for the fires and we see the birds and flowers common to the area. A woman skins a seal pup while another sews skins for a tent. The children play at making camp, and some of the older girls pretend to nurse the fat pups. Then the adults join the fun, playing at juggling.

Part 3 (33 min)

The men are moving about on the sea ice, probing for unsafe ice and watching for seals. The snow cover is nearly gone now, and the breathing holes have widened. The men sit and wait. One makes a strike with his harpoon and others come to watch. They are ready to eat and relish the good warm blood and the liver. Another hunter succeeds, and then another but this one loses his catch when his thong breaks and the seal slides back into the water. But the party has three seals in tow when they return to camp, and soon the women have the meat exposed and all eat. Then the blubber is packed into the sealskin bags and the men haul it away to the cache.

Films in the Netsilik series

At The Autumn River Camp
At The Caribou Crossing Place
At The Spring Sea Ice Camp
At The Winter Sea Ice Camp

Building a Kayak

Fishing at the Stone Weir

Group Hunting on the Spring Ice

Jigging for Lake Trout

Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice

About the Netsilik series

Note on Term "Eskimo":

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In Search of the Hamat'sa

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

In Search of the Hamat'sa
Buy Now: $295.00

The Hamat'sa (or "Cannibal Dance") is the most important-and highly represented-ceremony of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of British Columbia. This film traces the history of anthropological depictions of the dance and, through the return of archival materials to a First Nations community, presents some of the ways in which diverse attitudes toward this history inform current performances of the Hamat'sa. With a secondary focus on the filmmaker's fieldwork experience, the film also attends specifically to the ethics of ethnographic representation and to the renegotiation of relationships between anthropologists and their research partners.

The material for this film was gathered and shot over the year between 2002 and 2003 during the course of research for Glass's dissertation in Socio-Cultural Anthropology. The research process consisted of extensive archival work - in which he traced the history of ethnographic representation of the Hamat'sa (in texts, film and photography, art gallery and museum display, and intercultural performance) - followed by an eight month period of residence in the Kwakwaka'wakw community of Alert Bay, BC. The film was edited in a documentary filmmaking course in the Program for Culture and Media at New York University. It is intended to communicate some of the complex issues involved in representing indigenous peoples and their expressive practices, especially as anthropological materials increasingly end up back in Native communities where they are used and debated as one kind of historical resource among many.

"...Glass is to be commended in his filming, as well as his writing and editing. It is provocative without being pompous, sympathetic but not romantic, and reflexive without being overly self-obsessed."
— Alexander D. King, Museum Anthropology Review

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Australian Anthropological Society Film Festival, Sydney, 2009

Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, Taiwan, 2009

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, New York, 2008

Society for Cultural Anthropology Meeting, Long Beach, CA, 2008

8th Astra Ethnographic Film Festival, Sibiu, Romania, 2006

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Jigging for Lake Trout

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

Jigging for Lake Trout
Buy Now: $295.00

Jigging for Lake Trout

More signs of winter's end as more wildlife returns. The family makes an excursion for fresh fish from a lake. They build a karmak and move in the furs, cooking troughs, etc. The woman sets up her lamp, spreads the furs and attends to the children. There are signs of returning wildlife. The man moves out on the lake ice and chips a hole for fishing. He baits his hook and lowers it jigging the line to attract the fish. Crouched by the hole, he persists with his purpose and takes some fish, as does his wife who has joined him. Both remain at the hole through a severe blizzard.

Films in the Netsilik series

At The Autumn River Camp
At The Caribou Crossing Place
At The Spring Sea Ice Camp
At The Winter Sea Ice Camp

Building a Kayak

Fishing at the Stone Weir

Group Hunting on the Spring Ice

Jigging for Lake Trout

Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice

About the Netsilik series

Note on Term "Eskimo":

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Nuhoniyeh

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:11:00 GMT

Nuhoniyeh
Buy Now: $320.00

This powerful film, produced from a Native perspective, has won many awards in recognition of its exploration of the history and current circumstances of the Sayisi Dene, a people of the ecological and cultural borderlands between tundra and forest in Canada.

While specific to the Sayisi Dene, the film provides an excellent introduction to complex issues of politics, land rights, cultural ecology and processes of cultural destruction and rebirth that are of widespread concern in the circumpolar Arctic.

It is a well-integrated film using historical photographs, archival material and contemporary film records that, together with the strong testimony of the Sayisi Dene people themselves, combine to provide a positive statement of human potential."

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Society for Visual Anthropology, commendation 1993

Honorable Mention, Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Video Festival, 1993

Silver Apple Award, National Educational Film & Video Festival, 1994

34th Festival dei Popoli, Florence, Italy, 1993

Best of Category: Native Peoples Perspectives, International Wildlife Festival, 1993

Gottingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, (IWF),Germany, 1994

Yorkton Film Festival, Canada, 1994

Gemini Award: The Canada Award 1996

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