Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Inequalities / Integration / All Films

Dollars and Dreams

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Dollars and Dreams is a documentary film focused on the pursuits and challenges of numerous West African immigrants as they confront the idea of the American Dream and the reality of the New York experience. Including additional perspective from scholars, authors, and community leaders, the film creates a vibrant portrait of African achievement throughout the city, while exploring the complicated issues African immigrants face as they balance their deep connections to Africa and their enthusiastic commitments to America.

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Down the Project

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Down the Project
Buy Now: $320.00

Sixty years ago, the "projects" were considered to be the most desirable housing stock for low-to-low-middle-income Americans. Today, this same housing has become stigmatized, beset by financial and social problems, and may be phased out.

This film, made in the 1980s, remains the classic portrait of a government program besieged on all sides. In two 30-minute sections, the film presents a concise social history of a housing movement and its opponents, then examines the social dilemmas of the developments these forces produced. Spokespeople include residents, public housing advocates from the 1930s, developers, administrators and politicians.

Down The Project: The Crisis of Public Housing presents the story of two projects that housed working families, both white and black, in the 1940s. In later years, crippled by lower budgets and the needs of poorer populations, they came to be regarded as eyesores, as danger zones. How did these changes occur? How did public housing begin? Which forces lobbied for it and against it? How do the people living in this housing see it?

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A Family of Many Nations

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:52:00 GMT

A Family of Many Nations
Buy Now: $320.00

This is a hopeful story of the changing face of education in America. At White Center Heights Elementary School, located just south of Seattle, Washington, the students speak twenty-seven different languages and come from fifty different countries. Eighty percent of the students speak no English at home and ninety percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. As schools grow more diverse across the country, White Center Heights appears more as a window into the future of education rather than an anomaly.

The film documents the uniquely positive approach to the daily cultural challenges. Here, differences are embraced and conflicts resolved. In addition to tackling issues such as poverty, and language barriers, school staff are faced with young children, many of whom have experienced the trauma of war and loss. From countries such as Somalia, Iraq, Eritrea, Laos, Vietnam, and El Salvador, the student population is a reflection of the rise in immigration of refugee families from war-torn areas.

Filmed with no outside narration, A Family Of Many Nations presents children, teachers, parents, local residents, and education experts talking openly about the school and home experience of students at White Center Heights. Emerging as the instrumental force behind the school's dynamic atmosphere is the principal, Greta Salmi; she demonstrates how to lead our students with empathy and intelligence in a complex new world. The microcosm of White Center Heights serves as an inspiration and an example for the kinds of opportunities which exist for developing successful, diverse communities in the 21st Century.

Screening

Des Moines Cinema, Washington, 2003

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A Frontier Conversation

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:52:00 GMT

A Frontier Conversation
Buy Now: $320.00

A fascinating journey through the Top End of Australia to explore what history means to the traditional landowners.

A Frontier Conversation documents a unique collaboration between indigenous and white historians from Australia and North America. In September 2004, a diverse group travelled through the Top End of Australia meeting representatives of the traditional landowners, and engaging in a dialogue about indigenous history. The themes that emerged raised more questions than answers - from cultural appropriation and copyright, to land rights, the role of language and art, and what history means to indigenous communities in the current climate of cultural reclamation and survival. Narrated by Professor Ann McGrath, Director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University, A Frontier Conversation is a fascinating and thought-provoking account of a journey that breaks away from "the History Wars" and signals the first step in a new approach to the study of frontier history.

"A Frontier Conversation asks intriguing questions, and has some unexpected answers. At one level, it's a very simple and watchable film about a group of historians from Australia and the United States visiting Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, and talking with them about the importance of history. As the film progresses, we realise that its concerns are not simple at all. They are nothing less than the complex problem of the very different uses that history is put to in different cultural settings, and its varied meanings and consequences as a result. The film asks some difficult questions: such as how valuable can histories written by outsiders to any community be? What are the responsibilities of the historian, Indigenous or not, to the people whose stories he or she attempts to tell?"
— Ann Curthoys, Manning Clark Professor of History, Australian National University

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Naata

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:11:00 GMT

Naata
Buy Now: $320.00

Friends and activists Bhau Korde and Waqar Khan work with neighborhood peace committees in Dharavi, Mumbai to promote conflict resolution through the collective production and use of visual media. Korde and Khan are both long-time residents of Dharavi and both first-generation migrants to the city.

As Asia's largest slum, with a population of 800,000, Dharavi has often been represented as a breeding ground for filth, vice and poverty, full of immigrants whose right to live in the city is often questioned by vigilante citizens' groups and right-wing politicians. However, Dharavi's long history of immigration has created a creative, productive space which plays an important role in the economy of the city; it is one of the major hubs of the informal sector that produces commodities ranging from food products to leather goods catering to a large export market.

When the deadly riots of 1992-93 tore the city and their community apart, Korde and Khan were moved to act, working to change both the negative perception of Dharavi and erase religious and ethnic divisions. Naata follows these remarkable men as they work on their film, Ekta Sandesh - their work paralleling that of Naata's own filmmakers, another filmmaking pair who are immigrants to their city of Bombay.

Traveling with a projector and a screen, Korde and Khan show the film at their own expense in communities savaged by distrust and prejudice. The two pairs of filmmakers join forces in this documentary to spread their important message even further.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Film South Asia 2003, Kathmandu

River to River Film Festival, Florence, 2003

The First and Last Experimental Film Festival, Sydney, 2003

World Social Forum Film Festival, Mumbai, 2004

Vikalp-Films for Freedom, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and New Delhi, 2004

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The Newcomers

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:11:00 GMT

The Newcomers
Buy Now: $295.00

The Newcomers is a film about economically threatened Appalachian people in transition. Fresh as the day it was made in 1963, the issues of immigration and migration and learning how to live with people who are different from one's self are as challenging and critical as ever.

The filmmaker George Stoney writes, “The Newcomers was made for a church audience. I suspect that that church audience shared my middle-class attitude towards 'hillbillies.' It was a re-enacted documentary but the family represented had gone through the experience of being newcomers in a community... It involves Appalachians recalling their own experiences of relocation to urban cities to find work. Over the years I have heard from a number of people whose families were in the original cast, so they seem to feel a certain sense of pride in the documentation...

But, for me, being exposed to them I felt was exposing myself to people I had always held in contempt. Getting to know them changed my attitude and I hope it also did for the middle class audience we made the film for. I suspect those class attitudes exist today and I hope that this film can continue to help change those attitudes.”

The Newcomers is used courtesy of the General Board of Global Ministries of The United Methodist Church.

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Tarahumara

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

Tarahumara
Buy Now: $295.00

Shot in 1976, but never released, this film is a rare visual document of the Tarahumara - one of the most remote and isolated tribes of the North American continent. Filmed during a gathering at the mission village of Norogachic of northwest Mexico, the nomadic Tarahumara are observed celebrating their special interpretation of the Easter Festival. The week-long gathering uniquely explores both Christian and pre-Christian expressions of honoring the Easter Moon, the time when traditionally the Tarahumara dance, plant corn and drink Tesvino, the corn wine that blesses nearly every Tarahumara occasion from birth to death.

Coming from caves and rocky rancheros that range from the tropics to the northern Sierre Madre, the celebrants arrive on foot with giant tambours, flutes and the violins that the Spaniards introduced centuries ago, violins that the Tarahumara still carve from their native pine. Clay painted and dressed in flamboyantly colorful garments, the Tarahumaras make the celebration an epic of dance which concludes by preparing the shamans for the final dance in which the effigies of Judas and Judas's son are destroyed.

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Benjamin and His Brother

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 09:36:00 GMT

Benjamin and His Brother
Buy Now: $320.00

Years of war and ethnic conflict in the Sudan have created a generation of young men, known as the "Lost Boys," who have spent more years in refugee camps than in their home communities. This intimate film recounts the story of Benjamin and William Deng, brothers joined in the struggle of a seemingly never-ending exile, who are then separated when one is accepted into a United States resettlement program while the other remains in a Kenyan refugee camp. It is not only a film about the two brother's dreams and reality, it is also a film about war and suffering in their beloved South Sudan, lost childhood and innocence, the trials of life as a refugee in foreign lands and the existing realities of survival. Real life in the so called "Land of dreams" – America – is not an easy adjustment.

"... In 1987 over 20,000 Southern Sudanese boys known as 'The Lost Boys' walked from Sudan to Ethiopia, and to Kenya with promises of an education away from the chaos and war in Southern Sudan. Now, fifteen years later, they are being resettled in the USA." — Arthur Howes.

"...I am called Benjamin, I was eight years old when I left my mother and my father and my lovely country Sudan. There I joined the multitude of children walking to Ethiopia, and eventually we are here now in Kakuma, which is in Kenya, and I am on the way now going to America with seven thousand of us.Where will you be taken to in America? I don't know? What will America be like? I don't know" — Benjamin

"... Traditionally they think that when you get to the modern world, you become addicted to the modern ways, but America is not going to change me completely, from William to someone called America. There is a Gold in America, and this Gold is called Education – They told me to go and dig this gold and bring it back to them." — William

"Benjamin and His Brother is an extraordinary piece of film-making: a story which is both "true" in the ordinary sense that it actually happened (and continues to develop), but also true in the deep sense, with the force and weight of myth. Shortly after we meet Benjamin, his life is hit by yet another calamity: William is due out of Kakuma on the next airlift, but there has been a bureaucratic cock-up, and Benjamin is left behind. The film follows William to Houston, Texas, where he gets a minimum-wage job in a supermarket and discovers he has a grandmother and cousins, alive and well in Kansas City. Benjamin waits on in Kakuma, where he is waiting still."
— The Independent

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Honorable Mention, forumdoc.bh, Documentary & Ethnographic Film Festival, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2002

Prix Nanook, Bilan du Film Ethnographique, Paris, 2003

Margaret Mead Festival, New York, 2002

Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California 2002

Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London, 2003

13th Festival Cinema Africano, Milan, Italy, 2003

Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles, 2003

RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, London, 2003

Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh, UK, 2003

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