Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Religion & Spirituality / Religious Conflict / All Films

Hosay Trinidad

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:27:00 GMT

Hosay Trinidad is an ethnographic film about the observance of Shi'ite Muharram rites on the island of Trinidad. It looks at this visually and aurally stunning occasion through a number of different lenses and will be of interest to anyone who is engaged with the role that performances, religious observances and rituals play in the presentation of self and other in public as well as private settings. The film will be useful in the classroom for instruction on ethnicity, diaspora, creolization, cultural pluralism, and Caribbean studies.

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Gogodala

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:26:00 GMT

Gogodala
Buy Now: $320.00

This film examines the implications of the Australian colonial era for the Gogodala people of the Fly River Delta, Western Papua New Guinea. Excessive missionary zeal, tolerated and encouraged by the government, contributed to the almost total destruction of Gogodala art and culture. More recently, an indirect grant from the Australian government has enabled the people to reconstruct a traditional longhouse, along with a new meaning and function: as a cultural center.

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Liahona

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 06:41:00 GMT

Liahona
Buy Now: $320.00

Liahona is an experimental documentary examining the culture, history, and lived experience of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, often referred to as the Mormon faith.

The film creates a portrait of Mormonism through documentation of LDS cultural dominance in Utah, the suppressed history of folk magic in the early church, landmark Mormon life experiences, and Sanders' personal history and connection to the church. Found media with the voices of outsiders and insiders illuminate a religion that intrigues many, but is seen as mysterious or inaccessible. Liahona shifts through perspectives on the faith -- from reverence to questioning, presenting the complexities of the vast institution of Mormonism contrasted with the tenuity of individual faith.

Liahona is an examination of how mysticism becomes mundane, the balance and the tension in Mormon life experience between the illogical and the pedestrian, the public face of Mormonism and gaps in accessibility. What is it about the Mormons that make them so distinctively different? Recorded on 16mm film, Liahonatraverses Utah, Nauvoo and Carthage, Illinois and Independence, Missouri to piece together this portrait of a faith.

“An arresting, deceptively low-key indictment of Mormonism composed almost entirely of found footage.”
— Tony Pipolo, ArtForum

“Sanders interpolates her found sounds and sights with original 16mm Bolex footage of landscapes and town streets, sometimes containing people posed as though waiting for something left up to us to fill in. Liahona encourages us to look not at costumes, but at faces, and bring ourselves to people whose lives could easily be ours. It does so even while shifting gradually from a study of Mormon life in general to one particular life, as Sanders' own voice enters the film's soundtrack to recite texts, sing songs, and ask her Mormon parents questions about their Church experiences.”
— Aaron Cutler, Filmmaker Magazine

“An accomplished experimental feature... The wide-ranging Liahona is neither a straightforward indictment nor a reconciled embrace, but a story inextricable from its artist's own.”
— Genevieve Yue, Reverse Shot

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Winner, CAMIRA Jury Prize, International Competition, Play-Doc, Tui, Spain, 2015

Experimental Film Club, Irish Film Institute, Dublin, 2015

Montreal International Documentary Film Festival (RIDM), 2014

Indie Festival (Belo Horizonte and Sao Paulo, Brazil), 2014

Marseille International Documentary Film Festival (FID Marseille), 2014

New York Film Festival Views From the Avant-Garde, 2013

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The Left Eye of God

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 06:41:00 GMT

The Left Eye of God
Buy Now: $320.00

Caodaists worship the left eye as an Asian synthesis of eastern and western traditions. In this film, they tell their stories of exile, anti-colonial struggle, and building immigrant congregations in California. Footage of rituals and temples, and archival images combine to provide a personal perspective on a largely unknown mystical tradition. Older religious leaders tell how this new faith emerged in colonial Saigon in the 1920s and was soon followed by one in four people in southern Vietnam.

Incorporating European figures like Victor Hugo and Jeanne d'Arc, Caodaists tried to heal the wounds of colonialism, but suffered persecution from the French, the Diem government, and the communists. After 1975, new spirit mediums in California developed an innovative style of worship for a generation of followers facing the challenges of the American context and newly re-opened contact with religious centers in Vietnam. How independent can California congregations be from sacred authorities in the homeland?

A more complete analysis of the changing worlds of Vietnamese Caodaists can be found in "Caodai Exile and Redemption: A New Vietnamese Religion's Struggle for Identity" in Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants, Rutgers University Press 2006: p. 191-210, and in the Material Religion journal article "Seeing Syncretism as Visual Blasphemy: Critical Eyes on Caodai Religious Architecture" 2010 6(1).

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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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Otaiya

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:51:00 GMT

Otaiya
Buy Now: $295.00

In the sixteenth century Portuguese Catholic missionaries introduced Christianity to Japan. The religion flourished for about fifty years, but by 1614, the Tokugawa government issued an edict that outlawed Christianity and expelled the missionaries from Japan. About 150,000 believers went underground and continued to practice their religion in secret.

These people are known as the "Hidden Christians". Otaiya, meaning "Big Evening", is the Hidden Christian version of Christmas Eve. Through the occasion of this ceremony, the film tells the story of Japan's Hidden Christians.

Made with the cooperation of contemporary Hidden Christians on the remote island of Narushima, the film features the only two remaining priests in the Goto Islands. Both men are in their late nineties and without successors. The ceremonial and religious lives of these two men stand in stark contrast to the materialism of the younger generation.

Urban migration of the island's youth, an encroaching consumer ethic, and ironically, religious freedom are the forces that conspire to erode the traditions and solidarity of these extraordinary and persevering people.

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Out of Order

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:51:00 GMT

Out of Order
Buy Now: $320.00

In Out of Order, six former Catholic nuns tell why they entered and why they left religious life. The women (filmmaker Diane Christian is one of them) describe their years in the convent and their return to the secular world.

The former nuns talk about single life and marriage (three are married, one to a former priest), about the changed place of religion in their lives, about sex roles, about institutional supports and burdens, about work. Three of the women teach - one at a state university, one in an inner city grammar school, one at a suburban high school. One woman is an artist, one an insurance agent, one a private investor. The film shows them at work and at home in New York, Massachusetts, Texas and Maryland.

Out of Order offers unique insight into female socialization and identity in modern America by probing ideals and realities of womanhood, sex, work and service from an unknown and unusual perspective.

Primary funding for Out of Order was provided by a production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The digital restoration was funded by University at Buffalo's Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture.

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Plastic Flowers Never Die

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:58:00 GMT

Plastic Flowers Never Die
Buy Now: $295.00

The war with Iraq was the largest mobilization of the Iranian population, achieved primarily by producing and promoting a culture of martyrdom based on religious themes found in Shi'a Islam. Martyrdom became state policy. Khomeini made it clear the war was a spiritual one that the people, and not a professional army, would fight. It would be a sacred defense; a war of good against evil, of spirit against military might, where a human wave of believers would form a wall of defense against the Iraqis. Over 800,000 people died.

Anthropologist, writer and filmmaker Roxanne Varzi spent twelve years researching and writing about post-Revolution public culture in Iran. As an Iranian-American who was born in Iran and left shortly after the Revolution, she found that even though she had missed the war with Iraq, it remained omnipresent. She spent a year in Iran without a film permit speaking to ideologically driven mural painters, museum curators, war vets, and other cultural producers alongside the secular youth who were meant to consume the culture created by the government. The result is an experimental documentary and meditation on the aftermath of the war, and especially the mourning after.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Noor Iranian Film Festival, USA, 2013

Iranian Film Festival Australia, Australia, 2012

3rd Women's Film Festival, Chennai, India, 2010

5th Annual Women's International Film & Arts Festival South Florida, 2010

Iranian Film Festival, San Francisco, CA, 2010

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Senhora Aparecida

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Senhora Aparecida
Buy Now: $320.00

In the Portuguese village of Senhora Aparecida, an industrial area near Oporto, the annual festival that takes place every 15th of August is being prepared. The biers that reach fifteen meters high and which are carried by 70 men are being erected and decorated. The penitents order the coffins that will carry them, in a procession, to the chapel as is the secular tradition. The Portuguese film crew arrives with the intention of filming this spectacular festival. However, another dramatic story is about to unfold and the filmmakers are there to document events as they happen.

A new, young priest arrives to take over their parish and he has his own ideas about how religion should be practiced in the town. He is "modern" (in one scene we can see his desk top computer in the background). He wants to put an end to the coffins procession. Conflict is inevitable. Strikingly filmed with a sense of tension which captured the drama inherent in the situation, Senhora Aparecida has been singled out for attention at many international film festivals.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Prize European Massimo Troisi: Best Film in Culture and Tradition from Portugal, 2000

Honorable Mention, Festival Internacional de Documentário, Loures, Portugal, 1995

Cinéma du Réel, Paris, Centro George Pompidou 1995

Gottingen International Film Festival, Germany 1996

5th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, University of Kent, 1996

First Prize, VII Rassegna Internazionale di Documentari Etnografici, em Nuoro, Italy, 1996

American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film Festival, NY 1996

Award of Excellency, Society for Visual Anthropology/American Antropological Association Film Festival, San Francisco, 1996

University of California Film Festival, 1997

3ª Mostra Internacional do Filme Etnográfico, Museu de Folclore, Rio de Janeiro

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Songs of a Sorrowful Man

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:46:00 GMT

Songs of a Sorrowful Man
Buy Now: $295.00

Lina Fruzzetti and Ákos Östör began a major film project in 2001, documenting the revival of an ancient tradition in India: scroll painting and the singing of stories depicted in the scrolls. The result was the award winning film Singing Pictures, released in 2006.

The current film is a follow-up to the previous one and deals with the life and work of a painter, composer, singer, well known in rural West Bengal, as a poet and mystic of legendary proportions.

Dukhushyam is a charismatic figure, one who has departed from convention in many ways, most importantly in encouraging women to take up the traditional craft of scroll painting and musical composition pursued almost exclusively by men before. Singing Pictures was about the trials and ultimate triumph of 15 women in the village of Naya, all of them his students, who formed a cooperative to practice the ancient craft of painting scrolls, composing and performing the songs accompanying the scrolls.

In a series of edited sequences the new film chronicles Dukhushyam's vision of the decline and rebirth of his art; his tolerant Sufi Muslim spirituality; his engagement with Hindus, Muslims and the modern world; his encyclopedic knowledge of changing musical and painting histories and techniques; the influence of his beliefs on his way of life, and his teachings for future generations of painters and singers in his community.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Worldfilm - Tartu Festival of Visual Culture, Estonia, 2010

International Ethnographic Film Festival of Quebec (FIFEQ), Canada, 2010

Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, Germany, 2010

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