In 1949, the Chinese Party of China occupied the whole of mainland China, and the Nationalist Party of China, commonly known as the Kuomintang, retreated to Taiwan. But not all nationalist forces crossed the Taiwan Strait. Some went into hiding, waiting in the jungles of northern Burma and Thailand for orders from Taiwan. They ended up waiting for fifty years.…
KE is a failed businessman in Taiwan who seeks to rebound and then works as a “Taiwanese Expat” in Shenzhen, China. Lili, a laborer from China, meets her Taiwanese husband online and moves to Taiwan in hope of a better life. Both KE and Lili cross the straits in hopes of achieving what they cannot find in their homeland. But…
How can an eight-year-old child come to understand the feelings of her family in one short visit?
Born in Taiwan, Tongtong has never seen snow. Her mother comes from Inner Mongolia, China, where it is minus 40 degrees. This winter, the mother decides to take Tongtong back to her hometown to visit her ailing grandmother. In this distant frozen land,…
This is a movie about searching and losing.
Two threads intertwine and form the whole of the story. One of which is about my husband, a man from a Ji family in Muzha Village, Neimen Township. He could be a descendent of Pingpu tribe, but neither he nor his family remembers their origin. A look at a few of old…
The Directorate General of Highways lends an impetus to build the road no.26 from An-Shuo to Shu-Hai by 3.8billion in 2006. The villagers in the tribe have many different kinds of opinions.”Tribe’’ is the main point of this documentary. It’s filled with rational and perceptual and it describes the relationship between the land and people deeply. It makes people have…
There were historical facts that passed down orally indicating Orchid Island and Batan Island had interactions in marriage and leather armor trading in the past couple hundred years. In recent years, five official “ethnic cultural interaction events” were conducted between the two islands, which can be considered as quite frequent for two countries. However, “root finding” has lead to new…
During a six-month period of living and traveling throughout Vietnam, an American filmmaker meets a diverse group of Vietnamese women and documents their attempted integration into the new global culture. “Vietnamese Girl” documents the growing pains at the dawn of a new feminism in Asia. And on a journey spanning thousands of miles, through ancient landscapes and cities of the…
Israel says that it is planning to remove and relocate 2,300 Bedouins from the Judean desert, east of Jerusalem. Over the past four decades they were pushed down the valley close to a hazardous highway while Jewish settlements and outposts dotted the Judean hilltops. The Bedouin shacks are routinely demolished by the Israeli Civil Administration on the grounds that they…
In the Greater Xing’ an Mountain of northern China, there is a group of people who share their life with the reindeers. These Ewenkis people came from Siberia over three hundred years ago. They have been living in the dense primeval forest and surviving on hunting and raising reindeers in their own traditional way. In 2003, the Reindeer Ewenkis came…
Hebron, only a dot on the world map, but a place that is known and recognized worldwide as the center of many conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians. It is also the place where patriarch Abraham has his tomb. Esther Hertog, a young Israeli – Dutch filmmaker spent three years in Hebron. She observed the daily life of the settlers, which…
Salem is an Iraqi fashion designer in Damascus. Botrus lives a remote existence in a hillside monastery. This consistently insightful and unexpected documentary offers a unique perspective on what the dream of freedom means to two very different people in the face of a brutal regime. The result is a vital snapshot of life in the year before Syria’s uprising.
“This is a story of the Lak people. It‘s also a story of how I came to know the people of the Lak region, how I learnt their traditions, became a community member, and how my story became forever woven into their own… I was also to become enmeshed in events that resulted in bloodshed, death and threatened the existence…
In 1997, Pu-u Akuyana resigned from an advertising firm in metropolitan Taipei, to seek a new life as she returned to her hometown Laiji Community. Putting academic training she received in the fine arts to use, Pu-u embarks on a creative journey. Pu-u pays attention to the future of Laiji Community. She consults the elders on how to fabricate useful…
Cina Alis, 74, who now resides in Hucida Tribe in Kaohsiung in Taiwan, is one of the few Bunun natives who have refused to move into the prefabricated houses offered to them by the insensitive charity organizations for free. As a matter of fact, the tribe that Cina Alis belongs to has been evicted and placed to a new location…
A reflection on filming in rural Senegal and a critique of the anthropological I/eye. The film “denotes something more than an exceptional spirit of observation; let’s say by all means a kind of amorous enthrallment” — Alberto Moravia, L’Expresso
With uncanny eloquence, Reassemblage distills sounds and images of Senegalese villagers and their surroundings to reconsider the premises of ethnographic filmmaking.…
The film evolves around questions of identity, popular memory and culture. While focusing on aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives and history of women resistance in Vietnam and in the U.S, it raises questions on the politics of interviewing and documenting.
Awards: First-Prize Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival; First-Prize Film As Art, SECA, San Francisco; Merit Award,…
Takhar Prison. 40 women. 34 children. Four cells. No burqas.
Women are normally faceless in Afghanistan. Outside the home burqas cover them from head to toe. The all-encompassing burqa completely mask their identity, rendering Afghan women invisible. And voiceless. Except when they are in prison, here they have nothing left to lose. Sima, Sara, Najibeh, Latife, and many more names…
“The Queen Has No Crown” is Tomer Heymann’s poignant meditation on family, loss, and the mental maps of homelessness. Three of the Heymann sons take their families and leave Israel, one after the other, for “better” lives in America. They fulfill their dreams, but shatter those of their mother. A divorcee, she is left alone in Israel with her two…
For Chinese parents, finding out that their kid is gay usually presents a major tragedy, with the big majority utterly unable to accept the homosexuality of their son or daughter. However, during recent years a fresh rainbow wind has been blowing over the Chinese mainland: a pioneer generation of Chinese parents has been stepping up and speaking out on their…
Right In the heart of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a small orphanage called “Little Heaven”. One of the orphans, Lydia, is 13 today. A truly joyful event, because she can now move to the ‘other house‘ where all of the ‘big kids’ live. Unfortunately this special day is overshadowed by the shocking news delivered to her by the…
At the end of the XIX century, four groups of indigenous people (a total of 25 people, from infants to the elderly) were taken from Chile by a German businessman and were shown as animals in different fairs and public exhibitions in several Europeans cities. Hans Mülchi, the director and Christian Báez, a historian, retrace the disturbing and moving journey…
Eighteen months after the nuclear meltdown, children in Fukushima are suffering from severe nose bleeds and are developing skin rashes and thyroid cysts. Citing a lack of transparency in the official medical testing of their children and the ineffectiveness of the decontamination of their homes and schools, the children’s mothers take radiation monitoring into their own hands.
In the historically most famous ancestral house of the matrilineal Amis tribe in Taiwan, the carved pillars tell legends. After a strong typhoon toppled the house 40 years ago, the pillars were moved to the Institute of Ethnology Museum. Recently young villagers, with assistance from female shamans, pushed the descendants and village representatives to communicate with ancestors in the pillars.…
Wei Tesheng’s “Seediq Bale” triggered hot discussions on the Wushe Incident. Eighty-one years after the occurrence, most of the relevant studies, research papers, books and films that are available in Taiwan and other countries were made by the Han Chinese or the Japanese. In the course of relevant discussions, two intellectuals from the tribe: Takun Walis (Chiu, Chiang-Tang) and Dakis…
In Japigia, a neighborhood in the periphery of Bari, Italy, a small community of Roma (Gypsies) carve out an existence in an illegal, ramshackle encampment. The local church has offered them a piece of land with prefabricated houses, but the town hall is preventing this offer due to their own plans for a future a railway station. Continually in danger…
Sakuliu is a Paiwan artist who treasures his tribal traditional culture. After leaving his tribal village due to unpleasant circumstances for many years, he decides to return to help rebuild his hometown, Da-She Village, which was devastated in the August 8th typhoon in 2009. However, gulf and conflicts between personal vision and traditional thinking, between old and new, which traumatized…
In 1915, Bronislaw Malinowski set out to document the ‘exotic’ practices of a small group of islanders off the coast of Papua New Guinea. With extensive data on sex, magic and spirits of the dead, his work would set the stage for anthropologists for decades to come and bring him fame as one of the founding fathers of anthropology. Four…
A coming of age story about three young Tibetans trying to realize their dreams. The struggle to enter the modern world while holding onto tradition is palpable as a young woman waiver between teaching and a career in Tibetan medicine. Her childhood friends, a monk and a painter, also grapple with which direction their lives will take in this rare…
You can’t surprise anybody with tattoo, piercing or flesh tunnel nowadays. Somebody tattoos himself on his birthday to emphasize his full age, and every girl “respecting herself” has a piercing in the navel. As the years go by, flesh tunnels stretch and the number of earrings grows. Why is it at the height of fashion? Why such a current as…
In the Golden Temple in Amritsar hundreds of volunteers prepare 100,000 free meals every day. The spontaneous choreography of many philanthropists hands reveals the essence and atmosphere of this fascinating place.
In a peculiar travelogue, two filmmakers dive into an ancient rite of manhood in Islamic Java – the tender and raucous sport of the singing doves. When General Zainuri announces the National Perkutut Championship, thousands of Muslim men arrive at the grounds. Seven hundred poles stand in the center. Men hoist their doves – perkutut – seven meters up and…
SAMA explores the Islamic music tradition in India and portrays how the two have borrowed and taken inspiration from each other, in both form and content to become a truly magnificent sound. The film attempts to discover that connection which allows the artiste to become one with the creator and experience the peace, calm, serenity and joy with the artiste…
In the wings of the opera “Maraina”, the film combines history and oral memory, to recount in music the Europeans’ first contacts with the natives of the Indian Ocean islands, made of violence and love stories. Between the XVIIth century and today, this historical road movie follows the cast’s fantastic journey to the place where it all began – Fort-Dauphin,…
Four strings, a wooden box that has lived for 300 years. The cello is the most human-like of all musical instruments in shape, size and sound. A daughter searches for her father’s stolen instrument for a decade. An artisan looks for the best way to craft the perfect piece of wood. A soloist travels the world playing. A copyist recreates…