Ethnographic Film Movies

An autistic documentary filmmaker studies two neurotypicals, trying to understand their shared way of being through objects, language and small...

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...

A young woman achieves cone consciousness.

A documentary portrait of life in the Cook Islands, focusing on Rarotonga and neighboring islands. The film records traditional fishing, weaving,...

In the South Seas, Samoan village life is portrayed with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a romanticized 'Gauguin idyll', the film...

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

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...

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...

Portrays the Nuer, Nilotic herdsmen of the Nile basin. Shows how their daily lives revolve about their cattle, and depicts the psychological bonds...

A seven-day initiation ceremony is documented in which two women undergo ritual healing following a diagnosis of spirit possession, presented without...

A young student heads back to his village during the COVID-19 lockdown to collect ethnographic material for his thesis, but as quarantine stretches...

For months filmmaker Thierry Knauff lived with the Cameroonian tribe, the Baka. This is his document of that time.

Founding father of Anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski's work raises powerful and disturbing questions today. This is a look at his legacy and the...

The film follows a group of Nenets women gathering firewood in a snow-covered tundra. This film is part of a larger Yamal Nenets Series, which...

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

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,...

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...

Biopic of Ceferino Namuncurá (1886-1905), son of a Mapuche cacique and a white woman, and the first Indian of South America to be beatified....