This is a film on a Japanese hiphop musician, Shing02 grown up outside Japan. He thinks earnestly about the issues of world peace, his nation and own identity, which attracted me a lot and let me to trace the world of his lyrics. Through this film, people will encounter “a new type of Japanese”.
In deep Hengduan Mountain Range, western Yunnan of China, there hides a special village which is not known by people outside. All the villagers inhabited here are children between 6 and 14. They live in the village all year round to complete their six-year study in a primary school.
It’s a place called “Tian Deng” in the middle of Hengduan…
An ethnographic performative documentary about the Edinburgh-based exiled Kurdish composer Mohamed Abbas Bharam – one of many prominent Kurdish musicians residing in western Europe since the mid-1970s. In 1976, M. A. Bharam was sacked from his Baghdad position in Iraqi radio and television for refusing to perform at a Ba’thist Party convention, celebrating the leadership of Sadam Hussein. The title…
The Golden Triangle on the borders of Thailand, Laos and Burma is well known for its cultivation of opium, but when Swiss filmmaker PeA Holmquist returns to the area 30 years after first visiting he finds that many of the fields are now planted with Chrysanthemums. Holmquist visits the Hmong villages he knew more than three decades ago to find…
A long, long time ago, the ancestors of the Hani (Akkha) and other people lived together in the same valley. Much later, as the population grew, they fought over land,
and the Hani fled to another valley far away. After hundreds of years, war plagued the new valley, and some people fled to where a valley meets the mountains…
Contemporary Serbia. All the young people left for the cities. Villages are becoming almost deserted. The population decreases, without being regenerated enough…
The hero of our story is the loneliest little girl in the world. She has no company. She is the last pupil in the school. She is the last child in the village. Only old people down there,…
JAKUB, by the Czech filmmaker Jana Sevikova, presents an extensive ethnographical-sociological study of the life of the Ruthenians, filmed in the Maramuresh mountains in the north of Romania and in the former Sudetenland in Western Bohemia. The film was made over a period of five years during the time of both totalitarian regimes and was completed in 1992 after the…
GREEN TEA AND CHERRY RIPE tells the story of six Japanese women who married Australian servicemen after the Second World War, their efforts to build new lives in Australia and the challenges they faced in an alien land. In 1945 Japan was a bombed-out nation in ruins, its people living in poverty. Precious kimonos were exchanged for rice. Australia was…
This film is Taiwan’s first documentary on music contention, recording the members of the “Labor Exchange Band,” returning from the city to Meinung countryside making music. They start caring about peasant and farm village issues after the reservoir debate had declined; their music is also more matured.
Taiwan’s farm youths now are in an embarrassing situation: those to the city…
More than a hundred years ago, ancestors of the Tachen people came from coastal region of Zhejiang County to Tachen Island, after the yellow croakers.
More than forty years ago, because of the confrontation between the KMT and the communist, they came to Taiwan and become anti-communist heroes.
Thirty years ago, for the need to have better living,…
A greenish hakka small village, Chung Giao Keng is at the north-west side of Tai-lake tribe in Miaoli County. Villagers still hold the traditional way of living, mostly engage in farming. Due to the decline of the traditional economic living, villagers are moving out from this beautiful mountain village. A decade ago, there were still more than a hundred families…
There are more than 150,000 migrant workers from Thailand legally hired in Taiwan. To these migrant workers, working abroad in Taiwan is a risky gamble. If things go well, they can pay back large amounts of brokerage fees and earn some money to support their families.
The three Thai workers from northeastern Thailand in this film, however, weren’t so lucky.…
Huang Nai-hui has cerebral palsy. He seems to be disadvantaged, but his ambition is much stronger than the general public. To have a family of his own, three years ago, despite people’s look, he married Navy, a Cambodian 20 years younger, and had this cute girl Jing-ci. His dream fulfilled.
For money problem, the couple was having more and more…
At the intersection of Hsichih Shin-tai Rt. 5 and N. 2 highway is an aborigine village. The Amis from Huadong named this new home in Taipei “Huadong New Village.”
The youths came to the city from their hometown with dreams. At the margin where cities connect, they found place for temporary settlement. So they started their own family and lived…
“The Moon is the earth’s only satellite, and the fifth largest in the solar system. Its surface is full of meteorite pits, high mountains, and plains; quite desolate, a world of deadly stillness. When we’re looking into the starry sky, we’re actually peeking into its past…”
Hebei origin, air-force officer retiree, Mr. Chou, now diligently learning Taiwanese, met “Chang Jiang…
Is the Crown at war with us? is a powerful and painstakingly researched look at the conflict over fishing rights between the Mi’gmaq people of Esgenoopetitj (Burnt Church), New Brunswick and their non-Native neighbours. The Mi’gmaq had been fishing the waters of Miramichi Bay since time immemorial, and their right to do so had been upheld in a landmark 1999…
In year 2000, American cellist David Darling came to the far mountains in southern Taiwan. He was stunned when he first heard the pure voices of Bunu children. “That day,” he said,” my cello became silent.” Two years later, he returned to the aborigine village with an unprecedented music plan-using his cello and the Bunu voice to start a music…
This film focuses on Edmund Carpenter’s pioneering role in visual anthropology and media ecology. A maverick who explored the borderlands between ethnography and media over fifty years, Carpenter looked at the revolutionary impact of film and photography on tribal peoples, He opened the Pandora’s box of electronice media with delight and horror, embracing it even as he recoiled from its…
A sever earthquake shattered the modest living in this small village in the middle of Taiwan. In order to rebuild their ruined elementary school and transform it into an ecological forest school to fit the natural environment, villagers of Neihu, the small, undeveloped village, stand up to fight their war with the great and advanced National Taiwan University.
Being the…
A married mother of five, Duka enters a state of emotional turmoil when her husband marries again. Among the Hamar in Southern Ethiopia who live with herds and cultivate small fields of sorghum in their remote, bush-covered country, men are allowed to marry more than one wife, but few do. From dilemma to resolution, the complicated relationships between the wives,…
Alfred Melotu is a Big Man and Paramouth Chief among the Melanesians in the Reef Islands group off, the Solomon Islands. In 1994 a film crew visited Alfred in order to plan a future film. Unfortunately, on the return in 1996 Alfred was on his deathbed suffering from mouth cancer. Nevertheless, he was still a Big Man. Alfred consequently allowed…
Must we really forget our ancestors in order to become modern?”
In a small village of Papua New Guinea, three exceptional men rival with each other, in the field of rituals and artistic creation, in order to win over their neighbours to their own philosophical view of the future. The stakes are high, and the question is in fact identical…
In November 1993, Tian Feng, a first class composer from the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, arrived in Yunnan, and opened the Yunnan Minority Nationalities Institute of Traditional Culture.
Tian Feng proposed the prinicple of “seek authenticity and prohibit adaptations”. He wishes to start from this concept to save the music and dance culture with “classical
characteristics” (his words) from the…
DADDY & PAPA is a one hour documentary exploring the personal, cultural, and political impact of gay men who are making a decision that is at once traditional and revolutionary: to raise children themselves. Taking us inside four gay male families, DADDY & PAPA traces the day-to-day challenges and the larger, critical issues that inevitably intersect their private lives-the ambiguous…
When Bill and Mick Thaiday grew up on Palm Island in the 1950s, it was radio that imposed by the Aboriginal Protection Act. Later, it would also free them from the grip of alcohol addiction and start them on a journey that’s lasted almost 20 years. Together they have travelled like a couple of nomads, developing Aboriginal radio stations in…
Indo Pino is a Taw-Waliya.
In the Wana language, the word “Taw” means “man”, “human being”. The word “Waliya” designates “beings of the forest”. This is how the Wanas call their shamen: the “Taw-Waliya”.
The Wana Wewaju who number about 1600, live in Indonesia, in the eastern part of Sulawesi (Celebes Island), among the dense equatorial rain forest…
The word “music” does not exist in the Tao language, however, music and sound are indispensable in the lives of Tao people. The ever-present singing and chanting in Tao society are an integral part of their culture. Their music “does not seek to please the ears. The goal is simply to express every aspect of life through sound.”
With the…
According to Bunun legend, there were once two suns in the sky. The heat was intense, so the people shot down one of the suns. The wounded sun became the moon and fell into the mountains. Because of the pain, it pressed into the earth and created a gully into which its tears flowed.
As a child, Anu Takilulun was…
Oroqen means “people of the mountain.” China’s 6,000 Oroqen inhabit the Oroqen Autonomous Banner in the Greater and Lesser Hinggan Mountains of Inner Mongolia. Some live in Heilongjiang Province. Historically, the Oroqen were a nomadic people. The Oroqen love to dance and sing and have a repertoire of folk songs praising nature, love, hunting and the struggles of life. They…
Marguerite Harrison, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack travel through Asia Minor to reach a tribe of nomads in Iran known as the Bakhtiari. They follow the tribesmen on their 48-day trek across deserts, rivers and mountains to reach a summer pasture for their flocks. There are hardships and conquests for the 50,000 tribesmen leading their 500,000 animals across…
Les Maitres Fous is about the ceremony of a religious sect, the Hauka, which was widespread in West Africa from the 1920s to the 1950s. Hauka participants were usually rural migrants from Niger who came to cities such as Accra in Ghana (then Gold Coast), where they found work as laborers in the city’s lumber yards as stevedores at the…
In Jaguar, Damoure, Lam and Illo play the roles of young Africans who, at that time, migrated from the interior during the dry season to the Gold Coast in search of work. Their picuresque and rambling adventures along the way provide the antic story-line of the film. The different episodes of the film were worked out by the actors at…
Moi, Un Noir was Rouch’s first feature length film. Shot in Treichville, a slum/suburb of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, the film continues many of the themes of earlier work (especially Jaguar and Les Maitres Fous): immigration to the coastal towns, contact of colonizers and colonized, the effects of colonialism and proletarianization. An attempt to “mix fiction with reality,” it…