Documentary Educational Resources - Indigenous Studies / People & Portraits / All Films

Goodbye, Captain

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 14:42:23 GMT

Goodbye, Captain relates the story of Brazil's indigenous Gavião people and their efforts to maintain their language, livelihood, and identity throughout a half-century of upheavals. At the center of this historical narrative is "Captain" Krôhôkrenhum Jopaipairé, leader of the Gavião community in the south of Pará. Krôhôkrenhum shares the history of his people and details his commitment to restoring the community’s cultural traditions.

Krôhôkrenhum’s tells filmmaker Vincent Carelli the history of his community, beginning with the wars of the “brave Indian” and the terrible devastation that began with contact with the kupen or white man, who brought with them new diseases and left few survivors scattered around the region. Further encroachment of the kupen resulted in the loss of Gavião lands and resources, including the nut trees that offered them economic independence, the imposition of slave labor, and a generation raised outside of their culture and language.

As the story continues, strategic alliances with other Gavião groups enable Krôhôkrenhum and his people to rebel against harmful government policies and ultimately gain control of their plantation and obtain financial autonomy. Contact with other Gavião groups also inspires Krôhôkrenhum and the community to revitalize the Gavião language and ceremonies.

Woven throughout this history is the relationship between the captain and Vincent Carelli, who began filming the community using a VHS camera in 1987. The film opens with Carelli’s return of an audio-visual archive to the Gavião community and the promise of fulfilling Krôhôkrenhum’s wish to maintain the memory of his people.

Selected Screenings & Awards

Prix Mondes en Regards, Jean Rouch International Ethnographic Film Festival, France, 2023
Sheffield International Documentary Festival, United Kingdom, 2022

Doclisboa International Film Festival, Portugal, 2022

IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival), Amsterdam, 2022

It’s All True - International Documentary Festival, Brazil, 2022

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Mundo

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 08:50:58 GMT

Mundo
Buy Now: $295.00

Every day, the elderly Matilde and her dog Lucas tend her herd of sheep and alpacas. Matilde spins wool by hand, and skins an alpaca that was attacked by a fox. Her daily life is steeped in the gospel; the Bible is her faithful companion.

The Aymara community, to which Matilde belongs, has long lived in the mountains and high plains along what are now the borders of Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina. After the Spanish evangelization campaigns, a second wave of conversions has reached this community in the last few decades. Now Matilde trusts more in Heaven than in Earth.

In the prologue we hear that, according to their adopted belief, Earth is Satan’s domain. The once revered natural world has been demoted in status—it is now regarded as an unpredictable and threatening place. One outcome of this worldview is that Matilde is convinced that the fox that attacked her alpaca was sent by the devil. All the while, this elderly woman is surrounded by magnificent natural scenes: the majestic mountains stand like silent witnesses to a connection that is changing.

The film is a short yet effective look into one woman's crisis of faith. However, the MVP of the film's runtime is the breathtaking views of the mountains, rivers, and other landscapes found throughout the land the Aymara occupy. It's simple, yet riveting. – Video Librarian

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS
Best of Fests, IDFA, Netherlands, 2020
Best Short Documentary, FESAALP, Argentina, 2020

Tampere Film Festival, Finland, 2021
LASA2020 Film Festival, USA, 2021
Trento Film Festival, Italy, 2021
Festival de cine en Lenguas Originarias, Peru, 2020

Festival de Biarritz Amérique Latine, France, 2020
Athens Ethnographic Film Fest, Greece, 2020
Festival Cine+Video Indígena, Chile, 2020

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The Healer and the Psychiatrist

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 11:44:58 GMT

The Healer and the Psychiatrist
Buy Now: $320.00

On the South Pacific Island group of Vava’u, the traditional healer Emeline Lolohea treats people affected by spirits. One day away by ferry, the only Tongan Psychiatrist Dr Mapa Puloka has established a public psychiatry well known across the region. Although the two healers have never met in person, this film creates a dialogue between them on the nature of mental illness and spiritual affliction - and the shared obstacles they face in providing their services to the people in need. Their commitment and transformative communication offers challenges and opportunities to help address the growing global mental health crisis.

For two years, film director Mike Poltorak used a video camera as anintegral part of his medical anthropological research on traditionalhealing and mental illness in Tonga. After many more years of researchand filming, he learned just how important the relationship between filmmaker and subject is in creating a filmrespectful of Tongan values and of utility for the global Tongancommunity. Through this relationship, his film presents possibilitiesfor improvement in health communication and outcomes for the Kingdom of Tonga, the development of a public psychiatry moresensitive to traditional healing, as well as to encourage culturallyvalued talanoa between traditional and biomedical practitioners.

"The film offers close-ups into the intimate life of therapeutic rituals and allows the viewer to experience the sounds, colors, and affects that compose and make possible healing practices at the thresholds of different cosmologies." — Samuele Collu, McGill University

"This is going to be a valuable resource for mental health here in New Zealand and in Tonga. The reason being the Government has finally agreed that healing ought to happen, or the system, closer to the community. What really touched someone from the front line perspective, is how you had culture, community and clinical knowledge come together and connected up but also the story itself reminded me when the system fails it costs lives. This is something for us to be mindful of." – Pauline Taufa, Clinical Psychologist, Auckland

"The Healer and the Psychiatrist is a very moving and intense documentary that speaks to the value of ethnographic research over a long period of time. It explores the value and limitations of Tongan indigenous and Western medicine. The traditional healer, Emeline Lolohea, may have access to nature’s abundance and the richness of spiritual knowledge but her husband Tevita’s tragic illness speaks to the need for better access to biomedicine. Dr Mapa Puloka combines psychiatry and what is valued in Tongan culture, but how much does the continuity of his novel practice and healing depend on his individual efforts? This insightful and sensitive ethnographic documentary asks us to consider how the treatment of illness and wellness can be ‘decolonised’ even in a country that was never colonised." – Jacquie Leckie, Associate Professor, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ & University of Newcastle, Australia. Author of Colonizing Madness

SELECTED SCREENINGS AND AWARDS

Best Feature Film, Society for Visual Anthropology Film & Media Festival, USA, 2020
Commendation, Richard Werbner Award for Visual Anthropology, RAI Film Festival, UK 2020
Best Cinematography, Collected Voices Film Festival, Chicago, USA 2020

Ethnokino-Award of Life Time Recognition, Bern, Switzerland 2021

Ethnofest, Athens, Greece 2021
Mental Filmness, Chicago, USA, 2021
Ethnokino Film Festival, Bern, Switzerland 2021
RAI Film Festival, UK, 2021
FIFO (Festival Internationale du Documentaire Oceanien) Tahiti, 2021
Eyes & Lenses Ethnographic Film Festival, Poland, 2020
Trier Ethnographic Film Festival, Germany, 2021
Hawaii International Film Festival, USA, 2020
Collected Voices Film Festival, USA, 2020
Macquarie University International Ethnographic Film Festival, Australia, 2020
Garifuna International Indigenous Film Festival, USA, 2020
Riga Pasaules Film Festival, Latvia, 2020
German International Ethnographic Film Festival, Germany, 2020
LIDF (London International Documentary Film Festival), UK, 2019

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The Last Bonesetter

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 14:21:00 GMT

The Last Bonesetter
Buy Now: $295.00

In some remote areas of the Peruvian Andes, such as the highland hamlet of Chugurpampa, traditional healers have all but disappeared. This is due largely to an unstable subsistence economy brought on by climate change, forcing frequent trips and even permanent outmigration to the coast, with the result that young people are not able to devote the time to learn the healing arts. Yet, due to the rigors of peasant life, there is still a high demand for the musculoskeletal healing tradition of bonesetting.

The Last Bonesetter: An Encounter with Don Felipe traces the career of one of the last "hueseros, " or bonesetters, in the area - 80-year-old Don Felipe. Medical anthropologist Kathryn Oths has long been concerned with the survival of indigenous healing. She first got to know and work with Don Felipe in the 1980s when she carried out 18 months of fieldwork in Chugurpampa. At that time, dozens of healers offered their services to the sick and injured. While she kept up with Don Felipe in the intervening years, she was stunned to discover upon her return 25 years later that he was the sole provider of traditional health care for the large hamlet. Besides being a well-known bonesetter and herbalist, over time he also took on the roles of midwife and a curer of illnesses that are unique to the Andes such as susto (soul loss from fright). While there is a modern medical health post in the hamlet where he lives, it is seldom staffed by doctors and has few medicines to prescribe, Don Felipe is the only reliable source of health care who people trust for miles around.

Hoping to demonstrate the value of bonesetting and inspire younger generations to continue his legacy of traditional healing, Oths and her research team facilitated a conference at a regional hospital to showcase Don Felipe’s techniques and prowess on local patients for academics, doctors, and healers from around Peru. The ethnographic portrait of Don Felipe, set against a backdrop of breathtaking mountain landscapes, embeds him in his local culture and the everyday routines of life. This is a story of the mission to save the knowledge of one of the last remaining healers of his kind in the northern Peruvian Andes before it’s too late, including current efforts to find him an apprentice.

Also included on the DVD

Así Sobrevivimos (How We Survive): Getting By in a Changing Climate (7 min, 2018)

In Chugurpampa, high in the northern Peruvian Andes, a changing climate is putting pressure on a peasant agricultural community already living close to the margins. While the highlanders have historically subsisted on what they raise—which includes a wide array of vegetables, grains, tubers, and livestock—in recent years, disease, drought, and hail have destroyed harvests. Many families, unable to cope with these calamities, have abandoned their lands for opportunities on the coast. Whereas 25 years ago traditional healers were abundant, few now enter healing roles as a result of the instability. The only remaining traditional provider is Don Felipe Llaro, an 80-year-old bonesetter and herbalist. The future of an ancient medical tradition is in peril.

Selected Screenings and Awards

Honorable Mention, Jury for Music, Archaeology Channel International Film Festival, 2020

Ethnografilm Festival, France, 2016

Society for Visual Anthropology Film Festival (AAA), 2016

First Medical Anthropology Symposium in Peru, 2016

Society for Applied Anthropology, Vancouver, BC, CA, 2016

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Imaginero - The Image Man

Tue, 9 Oct 2018 15:11:00 GMT

Imaginero - The Image Man
Buy Now: $320.00

Imaginero is an ethnobiography of Hermógenes Cayo, a self-taught woodcarver and painter who lives on the high Andean plateau of Argentina. The film portrays Hermógenes, his wife Aurelia Kilpe, and their children in their Andean lifestyle, as well as Hermogenes' passion for painting, carving, building, and his devotion to the Virgin Mary.

Devout, austere and dedicated to craftsmanship, he can make anything from religious figures carved from cactus wood to a working harmonium. Inspired by a trip to Buenos Aires to advocate for land rights, Hermógenes has labored to replicate the style of the capital's grand cathedral and shrine to the Virgin with resourcefulness and skill.

A respected member of his community, the image-maker's wedding ceremony brings music, costumes and dancing, while Prelorán films life, festive and ordinary, on the coldest part of the plateau. Hermógenes and his family live much as their ancestors have always done, raising sheep and weaving cloth, but a train now makes the rest of the world closer; “the children play differently now that they have been to town,” he notes.

The film does not follow a traditional narrative structure, transitioning between themes and revisiting earlier themes later. In this way the film weaves a portrait of Hermógenes Cayo, the craft of image making, an indigenous Catholicism, as well as portraying the lifestyle of a solitary Andean family braving the harsh conditions of their surroundings. The relationship between individual and culture, as well as cultural change, is artfully expressed by Prelorán.

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Cowboy and Maria In Town

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

Cowboy and Maria In Town
Buy Now: $320.00

Attracted by the myths of town life and the chance of work, people from villages all over Papua New Guinea have come to the towns. Cowboy and Maria in Town tells the story of two such migrants living in the settlements that surround the capital, Port Moresby. Cowboy is a reformed 'rascal'- unemployed and illiterate with a criminal record. He invents an electric guitar out of scrap materials and plays his distinctive rock-and-roll on street corners, earning just enough for his family to get by. Maria lives an equally precarious existence. Seasonal gardening and her husband's small income as a night security guard are their sole means of survival. Only her resilient humor keeps her going when inter-tribal conflicts, inflamed by frustration and alcohol, erupt in the settlement. Cowboy and Maria are vital players in the new urban Papua New Guinea. Their interwoven stories highlight the consequences of urban drift, where traditional and Western values meet. These intelligent and determined optimists are far from being Third World victims; they go about their daily lives with humor and imagination, rising to the enormous cultural changes that confront them.

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The Chairman and the Lions

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

The Chairman and the Lions
Buy Now: $320.00

As recently as forty years ago, most sections of the Maasai were semi-nomadic and relatively independent of the nation-state. However, political, social and economic changes in East Africa have forced many herders to adopt a sedentary lifestyle.

The Chairman and the Lions introduces Frank Kaipai Ikoyo, a charismatic Ilparakuyo Maasai who, at thirty-three, is the leader of a Tanzanian village called Lesoit. Ikoyo was elected to his post at the age of twenty-six in part because he had completed primary school. That someone so young would be accorded such authority would have been without precedent not long ago. Yet this ethnography of Ikoyo's duties as village chairman shows how literacy and insight into the workings of the nation-state are essential for Maasai to combat the many lions, both real and figurative, that beset them: land grabbers, "bush" lawyers, unemployment, out-migration and poverty.

Like leaders of many indigenous groups, Ikoyo understands education to be a double-edged sword. He advocates schooling as a key to village self-determination, while still seeking to preserve the foundations of pastoralist identity. For as one Maasai woman argues, schooling may well transform their children into "educated criminals."

The film depicts Ikoyo contending with the invasion of village land by a non-Maasai farmer, interrogating spies in a lawsuit, persuading mothers to send their daughters to school, navigating the legalese of an exploitative contract, and eliciting help from a renowned elder to train young warriors in the art of lion hunting. The Chairman and the Lions interweaves its observational vignettes of Ikoyo's activities with narrative accounts by the chairman himself.

SELECTED SCREENING HISTORY

Special Jury Award, Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), Tanzania, 2013
First Prize, ETNOFilm Festival for Ethnographic and Anthropological Film, Croatia, 2013
NAFA - Nordic Anthropological Film Association Festival, Iceland, 2014
Ethnografilm Festival, France, 2014
Gottingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, Germany, 2014
ETHNOCINECA, Austria, 2014
Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec (FIFEQ), Canada, 2014
Days of Ethnographic Film, Slovenia, 2014
11th World Film Festival, Estonia, 2014
The Archaeology Channel Int'l Film and Video Festival, USA, 2014
ETHNOFEST Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, Greece, 2013
Intimate Lens Ethnographic Film Festival, Italy, 2013
SIEF Congress, Tartu, Estonia, 2013
The Heart of Slavonia' International Ethno Film Festival, Djakovo, Croatia, 2012
SVA Ethnographic Film and Media Festival, San Francisco, USA, 2012
Jean Rouch International Film Festival, Paris, France, 2012
Meetings of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, England, 2012
Festival of Visual Anthropology ASPEKTY, Turon, Poland, 2012

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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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Diary of a Maasai Village, Part 5

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Diary of a Maasai Village, Part 5
Buy Now: $320.00

This final segment of the series, Diary of a Maasai Village, depicts the ceremony known as the "ox of ilbaa," from which Miisia emerges, acknowledged as a man.

About the Diary of a Maasai Villageseries

Thisseries of five films by Melissa Llewelyn-Davies looks at daily life among theMaasai. The films are presented as a diary of a 7-week visit to a singlevillage. The structure is episodic and the content dependent on various eventsor stories, some of which are developed through more than one film. The tapescan be used independently or together, to give an in-depth sense of Maasailife. The series includes the following five films:

Part 1: The Prophet's Village

Part 2: Two Ways Of Justice

Part 3: Two Mothers

Part 4: Two Journeys

Part 5: Nine Cows And An Ox

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A Kalahari Family, Part IV

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

A Kalahari Family, Part IV
Buy Now: $340.00

After twelve decades of colonial rule, South West Africa is about to become the independent nation of Namibia and people are looking forward to democratic rule. Members of the newly formed, Ju/'hoan Farmers' Co-op travel throughout white ranching districts and black ethnic homelands to find long-lost relatives. Following Namibia's first national elections, United Nation troops help relocate these families to traditional Ju/'hoan territory.

About A Kalahari Family

A Kalahari Family is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. These once independent hunter-gatherers experience dispossession, confinement to a homeland, and the chaos of war. Then as hope for Namibian independence and the end of apartheid grows, Ju/'hoansi fight to establish farming communities and reclaim their traditional lands. Through depiction of their efforts of the Ju/hoansi to participate as farmers in the contemporary economy and advocate for their rights to do so, the series challenges stereotypes of primitive and unchanging "bushmen."

The five films in the series are:

Part One: A Far Country
Part Two: End Of the Road
Part Three: Real Water
Part Four: Standing Tall
Part Five: Death By Myth

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Best Environmental TV Series, FICA - International Festival of Environmental Film & Video, Brazil, 2003

Special Prize: Homage to the Films of John Marshall; Bilan du Film Ethnographique, Paris, 2003

Grand Jury Award, Best in World Cinema, DC Independent Film Festival, Washington DC, 2003

Basil Wright Film Prize, RAI 8th Ethnographic Film Festival, England, 2003

Jury Award, Athens Film Festival, 2003

Environmental Anthropology Prize, CineEco Festival, Portugal, 2003

Best Film, Jury Award, XII International Festival of Ethnographical Films, Nuoro, Italy, 2004

Visit the A Kalahari Family Microsite for more detailed information.

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