Movies: Ethnographical

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Early Mondo film featuring primitive rituals, animals being butchered, unusual birth defects, and a legit trepanation scene....

A man demonstrates a human-powered water wheel that irrigates a rice field....

A young woman in traditional Japanese attire fixes her hair and kimono while her servants assist her....

“The picture [shows] a number of Esquimaux picking nickels from cracks in a board with their dog whips, in which sport they are very expert. In the background will be seen one of their "Topeks," a sealskin tent in which they live during their short s...

“One of the principal features at the Pan-American Exposition is the Alaskan or Esquimaux Village. In this most interesting exhibit, scenes are enacted just as they take place in the far away frozen North. In this subject we depict a large number of ...

Film about the singing and dancing culture of the Ingush people...

The film was made on the basis of the literary version of events in the life of the famous Russian ethnographer, anthropologist, biologist and traveler who studied the indigenous population of South-East Asia, Australia and Oceania....

Travellers, nomads and salesmen make their way along a dam next to the Nile....

This first co-production of the Soviet and Indian cinematographers is dedicated to the Tver merchant Afanasy Nikitin who in 1466-1472 blazed the trade way from Europe to India. The film is based on Nikitin’s travel notes. Starring in the film are pop...

Remember the culture clash in THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY? This time it's real. One of the most ancient cultures on our planet is undergoing a major change. The Ju/Hoansi Bushmen in Namibia are not allowed to hunt anymore and need to converge with our so ...

The film tells two parallel stories. One, set in the present, tells of a pagent about the conquest of America, while the other, set in the 15th century, tells of a group of conquistadors coming ashore searching for gold. The film takes place in an un...

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An actuality film showing a Buddhist festival in Kyoto. The procession includes Buddhist monks, geishas, and others dressed coordinately to the Japanese tradition....

A group of people setting out to find a previously assumed land and upon reaching it, not knowing how to deal with the customs of the place, have to deal with all the consequences....

With a dual motion a cruise ship and a fishing boat pass one another on the Nile and butlers in turbans set up a wooden gangway. Thanks to a rope and pulley system cows climb skywards then disappear into the hold of the sailing vessel. On the bank, b...

A revealing one-shot portrait of two Nepali newlyweds in a moment of rest and playful interaction, Stephanie Spray's Untitled challenges our perception of two themes at the very core of ethnographic filmmaking: human relationships and the ways in whi...

Short ethnographic documentary showing a leopard dance based upon footage shot by director Luc de Heusch in Congo in 1954 reassembled by Damien Mottier (Université Paris Nanterre) and Grace Winter (CINEMATEK)....

An ethnographic film that documents the efforts of four !Kung men (also known as Ju/'hoansi or Bushmen) to hunt a giraffe in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia. The footage was shot by John Marshall during a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody sponsored expediti...

Two parallel stories about unhappy marriages that take place during inter-war period in the Banat village within Romanian ethnic minority in Serbia....