Documentary Educational Resources - Indigenous Studies / Social Conditions & Challenges / All Films

We Are The Warriors

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:15:24 GMT

We Are The Warriors
Buy Now: $320.00

For nearly 70 years, students and alumni of Wells High School in Maine have called themselves the “Warriors.” Their yearbook, the Abenaki, was named for the Indigenous people the town’s settlers first encountered in the 1600s. And the school mascot was a stoic Native American head in profile with braids and feathered headband. When, in 2017, public allegations emerged that Warriors fans made “Indian” whooping calls and donned “war paint,” the community began a process to decide whether to keep or drop their long-held mascot. We Are The Warriors follows the proceedings of the school district’s Mascot Advisory Committee and draws on interviews with residents of Wells, Maine to paint a profile of one community’s process as they confront their history and identity, challenging long-held misconceptions about the meanings behind their team’s name.

The film’s Co-Directors, both graduates of Wells High School, gathered interviews and insights from residents of Wells and Wabanaki people from what is now Maine, Québec, and the Canadian Maritimes. Revelations about the town’s brutal colonial history and difficult conversations about the actual impact of the use of the mascot were key to changing hearts and minds of committee members. The film highlights evolving opinions of residents with a secondary focus on the history of the region. After months of informed consideration, the committee votes to recommend that the school board retire the mascot.

We Are the Warriors serves as a case study for how one community contends with the legacy of settler colonialism and speaks to national issues regarding misunderstandings about the role and place of indigenous people in American society.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS
Maine Public Television, USA, 2024

Vermont Public Television, USA, 2024

Port Jefferson Documentary Series, USA, 2024
Tourmaline Prize for Best Feature made in Maine, 26th Maine Int'l Film Festival, USA 2023

Global Peace Film Festival, USA, 2023
Monadnock Int'l Film Festival, USA, 2023

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The Bride Market of Imilchil

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 10:15:17 GMT

The Bride Market of Imilchil
Buy Now: $320.00

Each September, during a three-day event, eligible men and women from the Berber tribes of Aït Benhaddou in central Morocco gather in front of the shrine of Imilchil to select a spouse and marry. Through interviews and observational footage The Bride Market of Imilchil presents an intimate portrayal of the Souk Aam marriage festival, enabling viewers to read the signs and subtle behaviors that shape this unique ritual, and offering insight into local ideas about marriage and divorce. In the final sequences, the film suggests the increasing presence of tourists as an explanation for the declining participation in the festival.

Shot in 1985 and originally released in 1987, the film remains a classic in ethnographic cinema and is an excellent resource for teaching about gender, kinship, and related topics.

“This is an exciting film. The very content captures attention. The photography is superb, not only aesthetically satisfying with its often muted colors, but also sensitive in its lingering portrayal of hands, faces, body language. An old woman praying, a dust storm in slow motion, accelerated shadows of clouds across the tent city: these are scenes of rare beauty…”
— Visual Anthropology Review, Spring 1990

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Oyate

Mon, 20 May 2019 09:47:00 GMT

Oyate
Buy Now: $320.00

Oyate is a time capsule of moments, gestures, and events that took place on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota during the summer of 2015. The narrative, pieced together mainly from the day-to-day activities of two Lakota families, anchors the viewer among the rhythms and sounds of everyday life.

While not an outwardly politicized film, Oyate is an unmistakably political one; a film that keenly and quietly positions a collection of seemingly commonplace events (a conversation in the back of a truck, a group of young girls lighting off fireworks, a birth, a wedding reception) as deeply felt occurrences of purpose, faith, and love in an often difficult world.

"This tightly packed and intimate documentary gives a rare glimpse into a forgotten world we only hear about in passing. One of the most important DOCS of the year."

-Devin Negrete, Film Note Magazine

“Unlike so many other documentaries about Pine Ridge that focus on the poverty and deprivation of Lakota residents, this film interrupts that narrative to celebrate families and the intimacy of their day to day lives." - Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Film, Video & Digital Media and Women's Studies, Duke University

SELECTED AWARDS & SCREENINGS

Artistic Vision Award, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, US, 2017
Regard Neuf Finalist, Visions du Réel, Switzerland, 2017

EthnoKino, Switzerland, 2018

Duluth Superior Film Festival Indigenous Screening Series, US, 2018

Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival, US, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston, US, 2017

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The Living Maya

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 13:21:00 GMT

The Living Maya
Buy Now: $340.00

This series documents life in a Yucatan village, focusing on one family over the course of a year. The films explore the ancient agricultural and religious customs that ground contemporary Maya life in traditional values – even as modern Mexico comes to the village.

Part 1Introduces the village of Chican and the Colli-Colli family, and examines the structure of Maya agricultural and village life.

Part 2Hard-pressed by an illness in the family, the Colli-Colli face financial and emotional challenges using traditional solidarity to muster resources and comfort. Drought threatens the village's crucial corn crop.

Part 3As the Colli-Colli resolve their difficulties and the village harvests a mediocre corn crop, viewers are left with an understanding of the underlying rationales of Maya life and with questions about their own assumptions, priorities, and values.

Part 4The Colli-Colli's two youngest sons plead to be placed in school in Merida – the first of their family to reject traditional life.

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Maasai Migrants Series

Wed, 5 Sep 2018 11:07:00 GMT

Maasai Migrants Series
Buy Now: $320.00

The seven videos contained in this DVD were made in Tanzania between 2008 and 2010 by participants in the Maasai Migrants Field School, directed by Peter Biella of San Francisco State University's Program in Visual Anthropology. The primary purpose of the videos in the series is to educate urban and rural Maasai about the consequences of migration, especially its relationship to poverty and the spread of HIV. The films have been produced through a continuing collaboration with Maasai-led and other NGOs, and they are being screened and discussed in Maasai regions throughout Tanzania. Their purpose is to trigger emotional reactions that prompt viewers to engage in important — though otherwise rare and uncomfortable — conversations, about poverty, migration, and sexual practices. The series also constitutes a self-critical history of a project in applied anthropology and gives an example for applied practitioners who may wish to use video in their work.

About the films:

Maasai Migrants (Dir. Peter Biella, 22 min, 2008)

This is the first film completed in the Maasai Migrants Series, the multi-year collaborative exploration of applied anthropological videos contained in this DVD. Planned in close collaboration with Maasai organizers and local migrants, the film depicts the appalling conditions experienced by migrants in Dar es Salaam - the dangerous and underpaid work of night watchmen, and the tenuous existence of Maasai woman who, without male protection, are always at risk of exploitation. The video is divided into seven 3-minute vignettes, each giving a different facet of the Maasai community displaced by migration. Rich with data, the vignettes trigger audience discussions about the challenges of poverty and the push and pull of city life. A film about the scripting, shooting and screening of Maasai Migrants is recorded in Subject to Change, a video contained in this DVD. There, emphasis is placed on how the video has been understood by urban and rural Maasai viewers.

Subject to Change (Dir. Shamia Sandles, 21 min, 2009)

Subtitled A Freirean Case Study in Applied Visual Anthropology, this film presents the theoretical assumptions and screening strategy of films in the Maasai Migrants Series. It does so through a history of the Series' first season, the scripting, shooting and screening of Maasai Migrants (also contained on this DVD). Included in Subject to Change is documentary footage of meetings with production collaborators — an American professor and his student who made this film, Maasai night watchmen, homeless Maasai women, Maasai intellectuals and members of a Maasai-led NGO. These meetings reveal the development of the themes and documentary script of the film, and how they are designed to promote discussion among urban and prospective migrants living in rural homesteads. Subject to Change also provides an understanding of errors made by project members in choosing the wrong venues for screening and in failing to prepare post-screening facilitators for their task of promoting audience discussion after the showings. Finally, Subject to Change presents footage of four post-screening events in different locations — a church, an urban market, a school and a rural homestead. The analysis of Maasai Migrants' goals and strategy, supplemented by Maasai viewers' subtle comments on the film, reveal a great potential for an applied visual anthropology.

Maasai Speak Out on HIV and AIDS (Dir. Biella; research & footage by Thomas Sengale, 13 min, 2009)

Ilmurran is the most-frequently screened trigger film in the Maasai Migrants repertoire. Like the others, its goal is to provide critical education to displaced Maasai throughout Tanzania. When the film is screened with a skilled discussion facilitator, it allows an unprecedented opportunity for Maasai audiences to reflect on the realities and dangers of migration. Longido Waterhole and Longido Homestead, both included on this DVD, record Maasai viewers as they watch and discuss this film. Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City provides discussion material concerning increased exposure to HIV, and the attraction of migration as a means of survival in the face of encroaching poverty. Following a strategy of collaborative, applied visual anthropology, the filmmakers worked with university educated Maasai to document the day-to-day lives of three young Maasai brothers (ilmurran, "warriors"). The young men all live at the same homestead in central Tanzania. Using interviews and vérité footage, the film invites the brothers to discuss discrimination, homelessness, and disease in the cities. It also highlights how their different ages influence their attitudes toward traditional Maasai values. Before he became ill, the eldest advocated migration as an expression of independence and courage; the youngest sees no purpose in "wandering" and advocates farming, a means of subsistence rejected by most Maasai. Ilmurran illustrates how poverty and migration have reshaped Maasai identity.

Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City (Dir. Michael Crammond and Kellen Prandini, 22 min, 2010)

Excerpts from Changa Revisited (Dir. Peter Biella and Leonard Kamerling, 17 min, 2012)

Composed of selections from a feature-length documentary, Excerpts from Changa Revisited depicts the shocking clarity with which three Ilparakuyo Maasai women understand the dissolution of their Ilparakuyo community. They describe their homestead as torn by human and livestock diseases, widespread alcoholism among men, and the increase of poverty, disrespect, migration and violence. Changa Revisited was filmed in a community that is very close to Dar es Salaam: for that reason, the community is experiencing the full destructive impact of migration and access to city life. Changa Revisited is therefore a cautionary tale to other, more isolated, Maasai communities that are currently less impacted by the crises of migration and HIV depicted in the film. Another video contained in this DVD, Longido Homestead, records women in a relatively isolated Kisongo Maasai community who watch Changa Revisited and discuss the fate of their less fortunate Maasai sisters to the south. The story of Changa represents to them — and to others in very isolated Maasai communities — what the future may bring.

Longido Waterhole (Dir. Peter Biella and Leonard Kamerling, 8 min, 2010)

All of the films in the Maasai Migrants DVD explore a technique of applied anthropology in which films are used to trigger often passionate post-screening discussions among Maasai audiences. Longido Waterhole, like its companion, Longido Homestead, documents such a discussion. As the film opens, a dozen Kisongo Maasai men have just viewed Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City, one of the Series' trigger films about social change. The viewers, who live more than two hundred miles north of the community where the Ilmurran video was shot, launch into a discussion about the profound changes faced by their own community. They do not concern themselves with the principle theme of the Ilmurran film, i.e., the crisis of young Maasai migrating to the city. Instead, the film triggers a discussion of their own related crisis — the city migrating to them. Rapid regional development with new highways, foreign workers and permanent dwellings are all encroaching on their once isolated desert grazing land. Comments divide along age lines: senior warriors criticize their "fathers" for facilitating the arrival of outsiders and for their adherence to "outmoded" Maasai traditions. Elders reply that traditions are the only value that Maasai should preserve. The discussion at the Longido Waterhole gives insight into the ideological rifts concerning modernization among different age groups of Maasai. It also shows how using a film that focuses on one facet of modernization may trigger discussions of others that are more pertinent locally.

Longido Homestead (Dir. Peter Biella and Leonard Kamerling, 8 min, 2010)

Like its companion piece, Longido Waterhole and other videos on this DVD, Longido Homestead is part of the Maasai Migrants Series, a multi-year exploration of the use of applied anthropological media in facilitating social change through the screening and discussion of trigger films. Longido Homestead's women viewers are asked to discuss a video clip from Ilmurran: Young Warriors and the City, and a segment of Changa Revisited (both contained on this DVD). Unlike their male counterparts recorded in Longido Waterhole, these women viewers stay focused on the themes of the films they viewed. Like the men, however, the women understand the film topic in ways that differ according to their age. Older women declare that traditional Maasai medicines are an effective cure of AIDS. Their daughters, adult women who have visited clinics and have some formal education, know differently. Longido Homestead shows how the screening of trigger films can create an unprecedented opportunity for open discussion between age grades, opportunities in which younger women may contradict and educate their elders. The film also reveals an important strategy in the use of trigger films among communities that are as thoroughly sex-segregated as the Maasai. The women are only able to speak frankly with one another when the filmmakers persuade their husbands to leave.

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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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Down To Earth

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:05:00 GMT

Down To Earth
Buy Now: $295.00

This fascinating multidisciplinary social history investigates the contributions of New Mexico's diverse cultures to the state's unique architectural heritage. Today adobe is often associated with wealth and the "Santa Fe Style." But adobe architecture also continues to play a vital role in Native American and Hispanic cultures in New Mexico. Adobe is not just a building material. Its formal and structural elements cannot be divorced from its social, cultural, and environmental functions. Down to Earth explores the increasing pressures of tourism and development and illustrates the relationship between the environment of New Mexico and the continuity of cultural tradition.

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Deep Hearts

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Deep Hearts
Buy Now: $320.00

Deep Hearts is a film about the Bororo Fulani, a nomadic society located in the central portion of the Niger Republic of Africa. The title is a reference to an important aspect of these people's thought and demeanor. The Bororo are immensely beautiful. They are also extremely envious of each other's looks. This envy accounts for their truly suspicious nature; one which leads quickly to feelings of fear. They are particularly fearful of being 'devoured' by both the eyes and mouths of those around them with whom they compete as beautiful creatures. The concept of a deep heart is useful because it accommodates their fears by providing a metaphysical space in which to hide their true feelings.

Deep Hearts describes the Gerewol, an occasion during the rainy season when two different and competing lineages come together at a designated watering place to choose the most 'perfect' Bororo male. It is close to being a physical and moral beauty contest in which the winner, selected by a maiden of the opposing lineage, is acclaimed the 'bull.' The film is also an attempt to let this ceremony of the Bororo be a way of speaking to the larger question of choice itself, something which confronts all human beings at all times.

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Diary of a Maasai Village, Part 4

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Diary of a Maasai Village, Part 4
Buy Now: $320.00

Two Journeys is the fourth episode in the Diary of a Maasai Village series. This episode contrasts the journey of Miisia's new wife back to his village with that of Tipaia's to sell cattle for Rerenko's legal fees.

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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Fate of the Lhapa

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Fate of the Lhapa
Buy Now: $320.00

Fate of the Lhapa is a feature-length documentary about the last three Tibetan shamans (lhapas) living in a Tibetan refugee camp in Nepal. With no other descendants to carry on their healing practices and a younger generation attending schools, acculturating, and modernizing, these "sucking doctors" are practicing an endangered tradition. Each lhapa requested that their story be filmed so that an historical record would be created. Their fear was that the next heir might not appear until after the old men's deaths. Subsequently, with no lhapa alive to mentor the children, the documentary would be used to transmit the knowledge to the next generation.

These tales of nomadic childhoods, shamanic callings and apprenticeships, cosmologies of disease and treatments, and of their flight from Tibet during the Chinese occupation in the late 1950s will be juxtaposed with images of present-day life in the camp, current healing practices and shared concerns of the future and the fate of their tradition. This is a touching portrayal of life in exile in a refugee camp in Nepal.

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