History
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Archeology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi
This beautifully crafted, poignant, and timely documentary explores the power of art to heal the trauma of torture. The film follows exiled Chilean musician Quique Cruz from the San Francisco Bay Area to Chile and back as he creates a multimedia installation and musical suite in an effort to heal the emotional wounds inflicted on him by the state-sponsored torture of the Pinochet regime.
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Backbone of the World
Set amid the majestic splendor of the northern Rockies, this innovative and inspiring documentary interweaves two compelling parallel stories: film director George Burdeau’s journey home to live and work on the Blackfeet Reservation, and his tribe’s determined struggle to protect its sacred lands and forge a new identity.
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Bear’s Hiding Place: Ishi’s Last Refuge
This documentary journey into the past follows a contemporary archaeological expedition to find and confirm the location of Wowunupo’mu Tetna, or Bear’s Hiding Place, the last refuge of the Yahi and of Ishi before his dramatic appearance in 1911.
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Beijing
Conveys the texture and flavor of the venerable Chinese capital through a close-up look at a number of its inhabitants, both young and old, with varied and fascinating backgrounds. Their stories unfold against the backdrop of a timeless but rapidly changing metropolis.
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Brownsville Black and White
This poignant and powerful documentary explores the complex history of interracial cooperation, urban change, and social conflict in Brownsville, a neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, from the 1930s to the present.
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Butte, America
This "beautifully told and eye-opening account of the legacy of industrial mining in the American West" recounts the sometimes glorious, often sorrowful, but always fascinating story of Butte, Montana, once the world’s largest producer of copper.
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California and the American Dream
This incisive, thought-provoking four-part series explores the dynamics of culture, community, and identity in California, one of the most diverse places in the world. Each film provides a trenchant and highly discussible case study of divergent California social trends that are keenly evident all across America.
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Chronicle of an American Suburb
This fascinating, multifaceted documentary is an extraordinary portrait of one of America’s quintessential postwar suburbs, Park Forest, Illinois, from its founding to the present.
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Confederacy Theory
This powerful and thought-provoking documentary explores the complexities of a controversy steeped in American history and racial divisiveness: the debate over the Confederate flag in South Carolina, the last state to fly the flag on its capitol.
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Contrary Warriors
This widely acclaimed documentary chronicles the Crow Indian’s; century-long battle for survival. In spite of every effort by the U.S. government to assimilate the people and acquire their tribal land, the Crows have persisted — their language, family, and culture intact.
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Cruz Reynoso: Sowing the Seeds of Justice
This thought-provoking documentary explores the life and achievements of a man who felt the sting of injustice while growing up and later, as a lawyer, judge, and educator, fought for more than five decades to eradicate discrimination and inequality in American life.
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The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy
This exceptional and compelling documentary, narrated by Alec Baldwin, examines the life and legacy of legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky.
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Discovering Dominga
This unforgettably dramatic and powerful documentary relates the extraordinary story of a young Iowa housewife who discovers she is a survivor of one of the most horrific massacres in Guatemalan history, committed in 1982 against Maya Indian villagers. The film follows her remarkable journey of transformation and discovery as she returns to Guatemala in search of her heritage and ultimately joins efforts to bring the perpetrators of the massacre to justice.
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The Doon School Quintet
This groundbreaking, five-part study of India’s most prestigious boys’; boarding school is a contemporary masterwork of renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall. Sometimes called “the Eton of India,” Doon School has developed its own characteristic style and presents a curious mixture of privilege and egalitarianism. Each of the five films can stand on its own but taken together as a series the five films provide a unique and revelatory cultural portrait that will take its place among the classics of ethnographic cinema.
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The Five Suns: A Sacred History of Mexico
This much-honored animated film employs authentic pre-Columbian Aztec iconography to depict the most important creation myths and sacred stories of the Aztecs and other Nahuatl-speaking peoples of ancient central Mexico.
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Food for Body and Spirit
The Tao of cooking and eating — the Way to health and well-being! This film investigates the impact of religious influences on Chinese culture and cuisine.
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Gringo Kullki: Sucres to Dollars in Ecuador
This “thought-provoking and insightful documentary” explores, from an indigenous people’s viewpoint, Ecuador’s difficult transition from the national currency of the sucre to the U.S. dollar beginning in 2000.
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Ishi, the Last Yahi
This widely acclaimed film recounts one of the most extraordinary and important stories in American history and explains its contemporary relevance with power and eloquence.
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The Last Zapatista
This remarkable documentary examines the profound and enduring legacy of Emiliano Zapata in contemporary Mexico. The film focuses on Emeterio Pantaleon, a 97-year-old Mexican farmer and one of the last living veterans who fought with Zapata during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920.
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Masters of the Wok
Like Chinese cuisine and Chinese culture, this film is a study in contrasts. It explores the evolution of Chinese cuisine from basic peasant fare to highly refined and lavish imperial cooking.
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Mi Puerto Rico
This wide-ranging and much-honored documentary explores Puerto Rico’s rich cultural traditions and untold history, revealing the remarkable stories of its revolutionaries and abolitionists, poets and patriots.
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My Louisiana Love
Every few years a new documentary comes along that so powerfully resonates both emotionally and intellectually that it can truly be deemed unforgettable. “My Louisiana Love” is such a film. This profoundly poignant exploration of environmental injustice and loss focuses a revelatory light on an otherwise invisible American tragedy.
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The Myth of the Buddha’s Birthplace
This fascinating and thought-provoking documentary explores the process by which a modern myth is created. The film illustrates how the people in a small village in eastern India have come to believe that the Buddha was born in their village, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
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The New Los Angeles
This engaging documentary explores the complexities of inclusion in Los Angeles — the nation’s largest "majority-minority" city and the city with the nation’s largest divide between rich and poor.
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The Peyote Road: Ancient Religion in Contemporary Crisis
This widely acclaimed, landmark documentary was instrumental in the campaign to have Congress overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1990 "Smith" decision, which denied the protection of the First Amendment to the traditional sacramental use of peyote by Indian people.
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Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya
This much-honored animated film employs authentic imagery from ancient Maya ceramics to create a riveting depiction of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation myth and the foundation of most Native American religious, philosophical, and ethical beliefs.
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Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya (Spanish Version)
This much-honored animated film employs authentic imagery from ancient Maya ceramics to create a riveting depiction of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation myth and the foundation of most Native American religious, philosophical, and ethical beliefs. This is the Spanish-language version.
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The Pornography of Everyday Life
This trenchant and provocative documentary essay incorporates more than 200 powerful images from advertising, ancient myth, contemporary art, and popular culture to demonstrate how pornography (defined as the sexualized domination, degradation, and objectification of women and girls and social groups who are put in the demeaned feminine role) is in reality a prevalent mainstream worldview.
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The Red Road to Sobriety
The contemporary Native American Sobriety Movement is flourishing throughout the Indian communities of North America. This vital social movement combines ancient spiritual traditions with modern medical approaches to substance abuse recovery.
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The Seasons of the Salish
Shot on location in Idaho and Montana, this lyrical documentary follows the traditional annual round of the Native peoples of the Northern Rockies and Inland Plateau.
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The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet
Featuring unique archival footage and exclusive interviews with former Tibetan resistance fighters and surviving CIA operatives, this powerful documentary reveals for the first time a hitherto unknown chapter in Tibet’s recent history.
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Still Revolutionaries
This compelling documentary explores the lives of two women who were members of the Black Panther Party between 1969 and 1975.
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A Stranger in My Native Land
This profound, poetic, and ultimately immensely sad documentary may be the first of its kind about Tibet — a vivid personal account of loss and disappointment as an exile discovers his country for the first time.
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Suzhou
Known for centuries as the center of Chinese culture and aesthetics, this Yangzi delta city has often been called the "Venice of the East" because of its many canals and bridges. This beautifully filmed portrait of the city leads the viewer through markets and teahouses, sweet shops and bookstores, rice paddies and fish stalls, and two of Suzhou’s exquisite gardens.
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Unfinished Symphony
No public topic can ever be more timely than the debate over the nature and limits of liberty and the means by which citizens may oppose the policies of the government. And no documentary in recent memory so clearly and with such heartfelt eloquence poses the key questions and issues of this always-vital debate as does "Unfinished Symphony."
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Water Farmers
The Yangzi River delta region south of Shanghai is known as the water country. Hundreds of miles of canals traverse the land, linking towns and villages. Here, near the city of Shaoxing, water has completely shaped the local farmers’ unique way of life.
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Water Puppetry in Vietnam: An Ancient Tradition in a Modern World
This insightful and original ethnographic documentary explores the complex interplay between the rise and development of the international tourism industry and the production of culture in the performance of Vietnamese water puppetry.
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Who Owns the Past?
This outstanding documentary relates the powerful history of the American Indian struggle for control of their ancestral remains.
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Wiping the Tears of Seven Generations
In December 1990, 300 Lakota Sioux horseback riders rode 250 miles, in two weeks, through bitter, below-zero winter weather, to commemorate the lives lost at the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.
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Xian
This wide-ranging documentary presents a cultural history of the ancient Chinese imperial city, once the greatest capital in the world and the Eastern terminus of the famed Silk Road.
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