Forest of Bliss (1986)

Robert J. Flaherty's South Seas follow-up to Nanook of the North is a Gauguin idyll moved by "pride of beauty... pride of strength."

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 footage, so this “finished” version was made by Teiji Ito and Cherel Ito after Deren’s death.

The story of a poor girl who leaves her starving family and sheep for a more prosperous village. Her grandfather finds her and tries to convince her to return to her home.

Forest of Bliss is an unsparing yet redemptive account of the inevitable griefs, religious passions and frequent happinesses that punctuate daily life in Benares, India's most holy city. The film unfolds from one sunrise to the next without commentary, subtitles or dialogue. It is an attempt to give the viewer a wholly authentic, though greatly magnified and concentrated, sense of participation in the experiences examined by the film.

Traversing 700,000 square kilometers over 700 days, the filmmakers bring the stories of five people who crisscross the Yellow River to perform their art. At the center of the web is Su Yang, a contemporary artist and musician and his exchange with traditional practitioners of Qin Opera, Shadow Puppetry, Hua’er, and Shaanbei Storytelling.​

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 called “civilized” lifestyle. For the first time the Ju/Hoansi Bushmen travel through the Kalahari and then right into the heart of Europe. What starts as a look at their fascinating culture becomes an even more fascinating look at our Western lifestyle. A warm and humorous reflection of our habits through the eyes of people who are about to give up their million year old traditions.

Founding father of Anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski's work raises powerful and disturbing questions today. This is a look at his legacy and the imprints it has made on the generations that followed.

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 region of Extremadura, in 1922.

A group of filmmakers travel to a Kolla community in Salta to film their folkways. We see all aspects of their life: farming, herding, cooking, football, and making music during a Pachamama festival. In the course of filming, the leader of the Kolla community changes the filmmakers' view of what the documentary should be, and at the end of their visit they are changed. "La vida se puede ir amasando, como el barro": As life goes along, it becomes more pliant, like clay. An announcement at the beginning of the film states that this is neither fiction nor documentary, but I'd say it's closer to documentary.

In Isère, in the mountainous region of Trièves, is the Tournesol farm, an experiential farm totally autonomous in energy, a veritable laboratory for renewable energies. Jean-Philippe and his family live there from sheep farming and organic market gardening. But in September 2017, a violent fire destroyed the farm and its facilities. While the family has lost everything, a surge of solidarity is taking place so that the Tournesol farm is reborn from its ashes.

This documentary started as part of a photography project about the indigenous Ainu population in northern Japan, portraying people from tightly knit communities. They feel deeply connected by their culture and tradition. With gorgeous pictures, the directors explore how different generations of Ainu reflect on their identity after centuries of oppression.

Meeting after many years, a makeup artist and her grandmother revisit tensions from an old family feud that still hangs heavy between them.

Um homem está lutando para evitar que seu amado touro seja usado como sacrifício pelos ritos fúnebres de sua falecida esposa.

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present.

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 disapproves the relationship and hates the woman. When the girl becomes pregnant with his baby, he must travel to find better work, leaving her alone with the mother's wrath.

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

The Bapst Brothers: Romain, Maurice and Jacques – whom we will also meet in The Gruyere Chronicle (produced in 1990) – are peasants and carriers and work with their father. In autumn and winter, they bid for the community’s wood, cut down the pine trees and bring down the logs through the snowy woods by horse-drawn sleigh.

Portrays the Nuer, Nilotic herdsmen of the Nile basin. Shows how their daily lives revolve about their cattle, and depicts the psychological bonds between them. Includes extensive use of Nuer music and poetry.

After his father dies, law student Adolfo (Jorge Marchand), returns to his native village in the South of Bolivia, where he falls in love with Claudina Silvia Arévalo, a beautiful chola girl nicknamed La Chaskañawi, which means "girl with big eyes" in Quechua. Falling under her spell, Adolfo forgets about his fiancee in the city, abandons his law studies, and succumbs to alcohol. Based on the 1947 novel La Chaskañawi.

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 the world to be donated to Haiti. The film shows the beauty of these objects, their significance and importance to the world's cultural heritage and highlights the link between voodoo (Haitian vodou), the slave insurgency and the creation of the first black nation.