Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Storytelling, Myth & Folklore / All Films

Ballad on the Shore

Wed, 2 Oct 2024 17:47:26 GMT

Ballad on the Shore
Buy Now: $320.00

Ma Chi Hang’s ethnomusicological film records a centuries-old oral tradition of fishermen and fisherwomen who identify as People on Water (水上人 ). Living in fishing communities on Grass Island and in Aberdeen, Hong Kong, they sing ballads about life on and in connection with the sea. The ballads, sung in what the practitioners call ''fisherman language'' are melodic and the lyrics poetic and rich.

The lyrics of these ballads tell the stories of the trials and tribulations of the life of the fisherman. They tell of a past way of life on the water and reflect a strong attachment to and knowledge of their maritime environment–where to anchor safely, where to avoid big waves or windy and cold conditions, and where fish are plentiful. “Anchor large boats at the tip of To Nin, a sampan sends the lover to Sai See Island.....” Ballads have been traditionally passed down from one generation to the next, but with the boat people's way of life disappearing and the songs reaching fewer and fewer listeners today, will the ballads continue to be sung?

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Taiwan 2023

Sinophone Musics Film Festival, Taiwan 2022

RAI Film Festival, UK 2019

MOViE MOViE Life Is Art Festival, Hong Kong 2018

Chiayi Int'l Art Doc Film Festival, Taiwan 2018

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The Mbako Trial

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 12:17:53 GMT

The Mbako Trial
Buy Now: $320.00

The film begins in the north-east of the Belgian Congo in 1933. Following reports of mysterious deaths in the region over several years, the Belgian colonial authorities arrest and put on trial a group of men suspected of belonging to the Mambela sect and of being responsible for these deaths as Aniotos, men who kill like leopards. Among them is Mbako, ritual chief and presumed leader of the Aniotos or leopard men. As the film progresses, the role of the accused is reversed and the colonizers' disregard for traditional customary law, social structures and traditional leaders and chiefs, as well as their devastating impact on local traditions, are scrutinized.

The pioneer of African animation, Congolese stop-motion animator J-M Kibushi takes the Western imagination of the Anioto as a starting point for revisiting this episode in the history of today's Democratic Republic of Congo, challenging the racist and dehumanizing interpretation of the colonizers and the portrayal of leopard men as the ‘savage Other’. The Mbako Trial: Myth and Reality presents a post-colonial reinterpretation of the hearings and trial through animations, illustrations, a diorama, theatrical reconstructions, archive documents and interviews.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

FestIFIS Films Identitaires et solidaires à Nikki, Bénin, 2024

Millenium à Bruxelles, Belgium, 2024

Festival Mundial de Cine à Veracruz, Mexico, 2023

GZDOC/Guangzhou Int'l Documentary Film Festival, China, 2023

Luanda PAFF/Int'l Pan African Film Festival à Luanda, Angola, 2023

Kasseler Dok Fest à Kassel, Germany, 2023

Congo in Harlem, New York, 2023

Vues d'Afrique à Montréal, Canada, 2023

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Cruces

Wed, 5 Jun 2024 18:06:15 GMT

Cruces
Buy Now: $295.00

Cruces is an experiential expedition into the geographies and stories of immigrants from Latin America as they journey to reach US soil. By weaving together oral histories and images of the landscape, the film highlights the constitutive elements of transit, such as trains and rivers, and the obstacles migrants face, such as forests, deserts, and border regimes.

Recorded in 2019 and early 2020, this multi-vocal ethnography conveys a collective view of the multiple stories of journey and arrival. Enhanced by an immersive soundtrack and an experimental narrative, Cruces offers a raw exploration of the terrain and testimonies constituting one of our age's most defining, challenging, and politicized phenomena.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS
The Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, UK, 2023

Athens Ethnographic Film Festival, Greece, 2022

Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, USA, 2022
Mimesis Documentary Film Festival, USA, 2022

Bogoshorts Film Festival,Colombia, 2021

Multimedia Anthropology Showcase in Madrid (MAAM), Spain, 2021

VI Mexican Congress of Anthropology and Ethnology Film Festival, Mexico, 2020
VI Latin American Anthropology Congress Film Festival, Uruguay, 2020

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Sama in the Forest

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 16:42:00 GMT

Sama in the Forest
Buy Now: $320.00

In a creative collaboration with local community members in Madhubani, India, this hybrid documentary highlights the tale of Sama, a young princess who wanders into the forest and befriends a young man, only to be slandered by a muckraking confidante of the king, and subsequently cursed and banished by her father, Lord Krisna.

The film combines footage of women telling different versions of the tale, the making of elaborate narrative paintings, a dramatization of the story, a yearly festival that celebrates Sama, and in-depth conversations about the morals and meanings of this and other traditional tales. The girls and women at the heart of the film are students and teachers at the Mithila Art Institute, a small school for young aspiring artists. Additional participants — community members of different genders, castes, and generations — help paint a complex picture of the social tensions evident in Mithila today.

The festival of Sama Chakeva is both unique to the Mithila region, and special in several of its qualities – notably, in its multi-caste, non-priestly, female-centric, playful and even bawdy nature. This festival is celebrated by groups of women and girls, who join together to enter the mythical world of Sama in song and ritual. They bond in teasing and torturing the muckraking character, to ensure the devotion of their brothers for years to come, and arguably to shine a critical light on some of the patriarchal aspects of their own culture.

The painters of the three paintings included in the film are all trained in the Mithila Art tradition that derives originally from a domestic, ceremonial form of expression and for which the region is renowned. Finally, another key element of the film, intricately interwoven with the others, is an enactment of the Sama story by the very same people who are also interviewed in the film. The workshopping in preparation for the enactment provided an opportunity for collaborative meaning making and personal reflection on the significance of the story in their lives today. And the filmed enactment itself enables the filmmakers to deliver these meanings to a wider audience.

Selected Screenings & Awards

Best Feature, Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, Canada, 2023

51st Annual Conference on South Asia, Ethnographic and Documentary Film Screenings, USA, 2023

South Asian Studies Speakers Series, Pennsylvania State University, USA, 2023

Contemporary Arts of Mithila Radford University Int'l Symposium, USA 2023

Signs Film and Video Festival, India, 2023

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Four Films by Robert Ascher

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Four Films by Robert Ascher
Buy Now: $295.00

This collection contains four animated films by writer, educator and anthropologist, Robert Ascher. These films were created using a technique called "direct animation" — drawing with pen and ink directly on 35mm film. Films in this compilation have been included in the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art, the New Zealand National Art Gallery, the Jewish Museum, NYC, and the Israel Film Archive.

Cycle (5 min, 1986)

Cycle is an animated film based on a non-sacred myth of the Wulamba, a native people of northeastern Australia. The sound track of Cycle is in Wulamba. The narrator assumes familiarity with the myths of his people. He does not tell a myth; rather he indirectly recalls central figures in Wulamba mythology by utilizing poetic devices, particularly the repetition of key words: lotus, evening star, moon, and the name of a clay-pan where past and future events are played out in the present. The images complement but do not illustrate the narration. On the clay-pan, people collect lotus, the roots of which become an evening star. It is here, too, on the pan, that a being, rejecting mortality, changes himself to moon. The horn of light visible at the close of moon's period drops into the sea where it becomes a nautilus shell. The process is a never ending cycle relating people, the spiritual world, and the natural environment.

Bar Yohai (6 min, 1987)

Shimon Bar Yohai was a second century visionary who, according to popular belief, wrote the Zohar, the main Kabbalah text of the Jewish mystical tradition. The film's images — tree, mirror, candelabra and the ten dots with which each is constructed — are Kaballah figures for how the world got started and keeps going. Once every year there is a celebration honoring Bar Yohai at his tomb in Meron, Israel. The last scene is composed from photographs taken on the roof of the tomb during the celebration. The soundtrack, a song praising Bar Yohai, was also recorded during the celebration in a town (Safed) a few miles from the tomb. Support for the film's production came from a fellowship Award in Film, New York Foundation for the Arts; funds for participation in the celebration were from a Humanities Faculty Grant, Cornell University.

Blue, A Tlingit Odyssey (6 min, 1991)

In just about every known culture, there is a myth in which a hero ventures forth, discovers something of great value, and then returns home with his gift. The details may vary from culture to culture, but everywhere the broad outline is maintained. Blue is a visual rendering of the Tlingit hero myth. The Tlingit are Native Americans who live in southeast Alaska. In their version of the myth, the heroes are four brothers who go in search of blue. The film starts with a necessary preface. The world is dark. Raven, the trickster, releases the sun from its box, the world is illuminated, and the odyssey begins. In part one, The Search, the brothers set out on a sea journey encountering marvelous creatures along the way. Action in the second part — The Find — takes place mostly within a cave where the brothers find blue. The brothers find and take something so valuable that they are pursued and a storm develops. One of the brothers dies in the storm; the others, with their gift of blue, complete the trip home.

The Golem (4 min, 1995)

Take some soil, knead it with water, and, together with a companion, chant certain combinations of the Hebrew alphabet. This formula, written down in the 3rd or 4th century, is essential for the creation of a golem — an artificial person. For ten centuries golems thus created lived in the imaginations of their creators. After that they became corporeal presences that anyone could see. Still later golems could pose real dangers and had to be destroyed by their creators. The notion of the golem is persistent and still evolving. Today golems may be found in science, technology and art. They are often associated with robots, computers, and new organisms created through biotechnology. In several 20th century paintings, short stories, plays and novels, golems are central figures. There is a golem opera, a golem poem, a golem ballet and a golem orchestral suite. And in more than a half dozen live action movies, a golem is the main character. The Golem, an animated film, was created by drawing directly on clear film stock one frame at a time. There are over 6,000 individual drawings. The film's soundtrack is derived from the earliest manual for golem making; the brevity of the film allows concentration on the essentials of the story. Although every film is, in some sense, an interpretation, The Golem leaves ample room for viewers to find their own meaning.

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Funeral Season

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 14:53:00 GMT

Funeral Season
Buy Now: $320.00

“We pray to our ancestors but we do not worship them. You, you need an intermediary, the priest. But for us, our intermediary is the ancestor who is sitting next to God,” says Poundé, the old Cameroonian ethnologist, to the young Jewish director from Canada. And with this conclusive statement, everything becomes clear: the funerals in memory of “the dead who are not dead” organized several days or even years following the burial, the chants, brass bands and traditional dancers who accompany and punctuate the village rituals. The ancestral rites struggle to survive in a continuously westernized society of consumption by parading wealth and excess for all to see — even the dead. Funeral Season takes the viewer through the red dust of Cameroon's laterite slopes and into the heart of the Bamileke country, where one funeral flows into the next. These death celebrations provide an opportunity to see elaborate costumes and masks, festive songs and dances, and lavish feasts, while illuminating the communal links which bind the Bamileke as an ethnic group and society. Along the way, the director befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors. At times, the dialogues alienate him from the locals; at other times they bring the two closer together. Like the dead and the living, they belong to two different worlds often mirroring each other. There is a lightness to be found in this subjective ethnographic film which imaginatively and symbolically turns the gazes of two different worlds upon each other.

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Itam Hakim Hopiit

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:45:00 GMT

Itam Hakim Hopiit
Buy Now: $320.00

Recently inducted into the National Film Registry, Itam Hakim Hopiit, which translates as "we / someone, the Hopi," is a poetic visualization of Hopi philosophy. Made at the time of the Hopi Tricentennial - marking 300 years since the 1680 Pueblo Revolt against Spanish colonial rule – the film presents a view of Hopi culture and history. Speaking in Hopi, a community elder shares personal recollections and cultural history, recounting stories of the Hopi emergence, perseverance, and the Bow Clan migration stories of his father. Through use of the film medium, Masayesva challenges viewers to understand the Hopi conception of time as cyclic, in which the world starts, ends, and starts again.

" ...The film offers a cultural bridge of a very different kind, evoking a culture and an environment through the look and sound of it and the fluidly majestic pace of its unfolding...to impart the drama of distant rainstorms across desert landscapes or cause one to gasp in astonishment at the rainbow that enters the frame during a revelatory pan, for indeed the lyricism of Masayesva Jr.'s imagery and the tone of reverence for the earth, whose caretakers the Hopi consider themselves to be, has the power to transport the viewer. It is the achievement of Masayesva Jr.'s work that even the most committed interpreters among us stand to be converted, if only for a moment, and taught the quiet virtues of observation.".

–Michael Renov, University of Southern California

"In this innovative work one of the last members of the Hopi historians' clan, Ross Macaya, recounts various epochs in Hopi history.... Macaya's tale concludes with a particularly Hopi type of history–the Hopi Prophesy."

– Elizabeth Weatherford, National Museum of the American Indian, in Art Journal

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Gold Hugo Award, Chicago International Film Festival, 1984

Museum of Modern Art, NYC

The Whitney Museum of American Art

The Long Beach Museum

National Museum of the Native American

Selected museums in Japan, the Netherlands, France, and the former Soviet Union

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Jaguar

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

Jaguar
Buy Now: $320.00

The richness of Yanomamö mythology is again revealed in this film (compare Moonblood and both Myths of Naro), as is the remarkable skill of another Yanomamö storyteller.

The myth in this case is that of Jaguar, a prominent figure throughout South American Indian mythology. Long ago, Curare Woman tasted bitter, so Jaguar did not eat her. Curare Woman hid her pregnant daughter in the roof above Jaguar's hammock, and sent Jaguar far away to hunt while her daughter was fed by birds whom she protected. One day the daughter pissed all over Jaguar. He smelled the urine and smashed the daughter to the ground, killing her. Curare Woman took the daughter's twin fetuses and hid them in a bark container, where they became hekura spirits. When they grew to be men and became Raware', they sought revenge. Through cunning and with an arrow obtained from the sky's edge, they succeeded in killing Jaguar.

Daramasiwa, who tells the myth, remains hunkering on the ground in one spot, yet through his dramatic body movements and versatile voice he conveys a sense of tremendous distance traveled, and of the qualities of the different characters.

This film, together with the films of the Naro and the Moonblood myths, suggests reflections on the nature of performance and communication in Yanomamö culture. At the same time the films remind the viewer of the complexity of the intellectual system in this culture, and might nicely complement a reading of Claude Levi-Strauss' Mythologiques.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

American Film Festival Finalist

Films in the Yanomamö series:

Arrow Game *†

The Ax Fight †

Bride Service

Children's Magical Death *†

Climbing the Peach Palm *†

A Father Washes His Children *†

The Feast

Firewood *

Jaguar, a Yanomamö Twin Cycle Myth

Magical Death †

A Man and His Wife Make a Hammock *†

A Man Called Bee: Studying the Yanomamö †

Moonblood: A Yanomamö Creation Myth †

Myth of Naro, as told by Dedeheiwä

Myth of Naro, as told by Kaobawä

New Tribes Mission

Ocamo is My Town

Tapir Distribution *

Tug-of-War, Yanomamö *

Weeding the Garden *†

Yanomamö: A Multidisciplinary Study

Yanomamö of the Orinoco

* included on the Yanomamö Shorts compilation
† included in the Yanomamö Films: Remastered, Vol. 1 set

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Moonblood

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:50:00 GMT

Moonblood
Buy Now: $295.00

In this myth, the Yanomamö account for the creation of human beings and for their ferocity. The myth is told by the shaman Dedeheiwä.

Long ago, when people "like us" lived in a village "over there," Moon lived there too, and ate the souls of children. The villagers became very angry, especially because when Moon descended to consume the ashes of children, hanging from the roof in gourds, he crunched and chanted as he gloated over his evil tricks. So the ancestor Suhirina, who was very beautiful and tall, shot the moon with a bamboo-tipped arrow, and Moon's blood spilled all over the earth. Human beings came from this blood: strong and fierce people from the center where the most blood spilled, and weaker people from the Moon's droplets.

You are from true blood, Dedeheiwä tells Chagnon, because there are many of you; my own village is weak, as we are descended from the droplets. It is because of Moon's blood, explains the shaman, that men fight and kill each other.

Moonblood was restored by DER with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Films in the Yanomamö series:

Arrow Game *†

The Ax Fight †

Bride Service

Children's Magical Death *†

Climbing the Peach Palm *†

A Father Washes His Children *†

The Feast

Firewood *

Jaguar, a Yanomamö Twin Cycle Myth

Magical Death †

A Man and His Wife Make a Hammock *†

A Man Called Bee: Studying the Yanomamö †

Moonblood: A Yanomamö Creation Myth †

Myth of Naro, as told by Dedeheiwä

Myth of Naro, as told by Kaobawä

New Tribes Mission

Ocamo is My Town

Tapir Distribution *

Tug-of-War, Yanomamö *

Weeding the Garden *†

Yanomamö: A Multidisciplinary Study

Yanomamö of the Orinoco

* included on the Yanomamö Shorts compilation
† included in the Yanomamö Films: Remastered, Vol. 1 set

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Myth of Naro as Told by Dedeheiwä

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:50:00 GMT

Myth of Naro as Told by Dedeheiwä
Buy Now: $320.00

This film presents a version of a myth, different from the Myth of Naro as Told by Kaobawa, in narrative detail and also in the individual raconteur's style. The myth concerns the jealousy of Naro the Ugly toward his brother Yanomamo, who is fragrant and beautiful and has two wives. Desiring the women, Naro kills his brother by blowing magical charms, and is eventually killed himself by a third brother and a variety of ancestors. This is the origin of harmful magic.

In telling the myth Dedeheiwä is, as always, a true performer, embellishing his words with gestures and evident delight at the drama and evocativeness of his tale. In another film, Kaobawa, also a village headman, tells the same myth in a gentle, more reflective style.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Finalist, American Film Festival

Films in the Yanomamö series:

Arrow Game *†

The Ax Fight †

Bride Service

Children's Magical Death *†

Climbing the Peach Palm *†

A Father Washes His Children *†

The Feast

Firewood *

Jaguar, a Yanomamö Twin Cycle Myth