Ethnographic Film Movies

David and Judith MacDougall are exploring the marriage rituals and roles of Turkana women in this ethnographic documentary. The film's biggest part...

This intimate ethnographic study of Voudoun dances and rituals was shot by Maya Deren during her years in Haiti (1947-1951); she never edited the...

A ritual vase, the hampi, is placed in the center of the Musée de plein air de la République du Niger in Niamey, during a ritual...

This documentary started as part of a photography project about the indigenous Ainu population in northern Japan, portraying people from tightly knit...

Robert J. Flaherty’s follow-up to Nanook of the North shifts from the Arctic to the South Seas, portraying Samoan village life with a painterly...

In Isère, in the mountainous region of Trièves, is the Tournesol farm, an experiential farm totally autonomous in energy, a veritable...

The young goat herders from the cliff of Bandiagara practice on the stone drums of their ancestors. An ethnomusicological film experiment describing...

Shigeki, one of the Ainu people of northern Japan, follows the traditions of his ancestors and teaches his son Motoki about their heritage. But how...

An account of the journey that King Alfonso XIII of Spain made to the impoverished shire of Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in the...

The Bapst Brothers: Romain, Maurice and Jacques – whom we will also meet in The Gruyere Chronicle (produced in 1990) – are peasants and...

The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed...

In Cerro Bayo, a mountainous region of Patagonia on the Chilean border, a Kolla Indian falls in love with a girl from another village. His mother...

Germaine Dierterlen talks about Dogon mythology at a conference on the Bandiagara cliffs. The Songo canopy is a sacred site in Bandiagara. Its walls...

Beauty and the Beast: Comparing Two Igbo Masquerades By Herbert M. Cole

In February 1974, Pam Sambo Zima, the oldest of the priests of possession in Niamey, Niger, died at the age of seventy-plus years. In his backyard,...

In front of Jean Rouch's camera, Germaine Dieterlen recalls her ethnographic itinerary, at the Musée de l'Homme, in Mali and in the Paris of...

Estonia's first ethnographic film. Made by Johannes Pääsuke in 1913 on his expedition to Setomaa, the South-Eastern region in Estonia.

Yirrkala is an Aboriginal township on the Gove Peninsula in Northeast Arnhem Land. It was established as a Methodist mission in 1935 and over the...

Marianne Lehmann, born in Switzerland in 1936, married a Haitian and moved to Port-au-Prince in 1957. Fascinated by voodoo cult objects, she began...