Movies: Anthropology

Several filmmakers discuss the introduction of Western modes of communication, especially film, to native cultures. While these tools can help a native people to document their own culture, it can also "swallow" their culture, encroaching upon and ir...

Men and women in the Horn of Africa and adjiacent regions of the Middle East tell stories of their relationships and contacts with demons and spirits in their life and culture....

“The barbaric negro inhabitants of an African village are shown in their various forms of activity, the first view being a photograph of a number of children of all sizes, shapes and degrees of African beauty. Following this is a match between two gi...

...

Explores the themes of trance and dance in the rituals and religion of Bali. The famous Kris Dance is performed....

"Sweet Osmanthus Flowering Late" is a feature-length ethnographic film that envisions social rejuvenation and collective convalescence in the aftermath of the pandemic. Filmed in Wuhan, the film follows the everyday lives of three middle-class househ...

Raised in one of the most violent outskirts of Fortaleza, the Cruz brothers had their lives shaped by music to the point that their parents turned the house where they live into a school....

Explores the historical and contemporary significance of salt, detailing its extraction from the earth and oceans, its role in food preservation, livestock nutrition, and its various industrial uses. The film highlights how salt has shaped human civi...

...

...

A deep dive into contemporary Brazilian music. Guided by the composer, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Kilza Setti and the Hésperides Música das Américas nucleus, the documentary takes us to a world where contemporary music, the Guarani and Timb...

The Fall of Womenland is a fascinating documentary on the unique sexual culture of the Mosuo people — a small minority situated in the southwest of China — and one of the last remaining matriarchal societies in the world. Without a formal marriage c...

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 with buying them to avoid their scattering abroad. Over the years it became the largest collection in t...

Short documentary about the traditions, lives and culture of the Qadiri tariqa of Iran's Kurdistan...

A documentary about the histoy and linguistic ties of the Finno-Ugric, and Samoyedic peoples. Speakers of the Kamassian, Nenets, Khanty, Komi, Mari, and Karelian languages were filmed in their everyday settings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. T...

Saint Anthony, Abbot of the Desert, protector of animals, is a central figure in the Italian countryside, where fortune depends on the health of the animals. To heal his donkey, Antonio asks the village priest to bless the sick animal. Faced with his...

The director’s grandparents Wilhelmine, an Austrian Catholic, and Bernard, a Jewish Czechoslovakian communist, have always been part of her life, although she never met them in person. Her uncle Hermann lives in what was once their house, with their ...

A dark and magical visit to the fabled Parisian address Rue Fontaine 42. This was the residence of André Breton, the mastermind of surrealism, who surrounded himself with an impressive collection of modern, Western art and ethnographic objects from O...

The subject is two grotesque-looking human beings who are sitting on the deck of a ship. The two weird individuals sit cross-legged and do the bidding of a man in oriental costume. The point of the film seems to be directed at the fact that the bone ...