In 1932, Muakai from the Zingrur royal family of the Kaviyangan village was accessioned into the Taihoku imperial University (former name of the National Taiwan University, abbr. NTU) and stood silently in the corner of the Museum of Anthropology. Considering to applying for the National Treasure, Professor Chia-yu Hu of NTU went back to village since 2014 and discussed related…
Norway, summer of 2000. We meet 33-year-old Sigrid Beate Edvardsen during the last days before going to jail to serve a sentence of seven years for killing her own father. As a child, Sigrid Beate was subjected to sexual abuse, and the film uncovers a terrible family tragedy. Still, one is left with many questions. The film does not try…
Like many Sri Lankan families, Dharsika’s father died in the war. She stayed with the family just long enough to bury her father, then disappeared into the guerilla’s hands.
Dharsika and Puhalchudar have a close friendship. For seven years they have been eating, sleeping, training and fighting side by side. They belong to the last batch of the Black…
Residents of an industrial town in the Arctic ponder how pollution affects their lives and the landscape.
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…
The film paints a vivid picture of Feliciano’s life, of the conflict between his love of the land and the work he has learned from his father, and the desire to see his son living what he sees as a better life in the city. Interwoven with Feliciano’s story is the complex history of his people. In his often poetic…
Rembetika music or the Greek blues is a music born of exile and the streets. Developing its roots from the mass migration of people in the early twentieth century, filmmaker M. Zournazi traces the journey of her forebears from Smyrna in Turkey to Sydney Australia but discovers more than family history, she finds out how music connects people during times…
The Mei-hua family of seven from Taitung came to the San-ying Village under the SanxiaYingge Bridge 20 years ago. They built their home with wood, nails and their own bare hands. The house they were living in was torn to the ground by Taipei County Government for violating building laws. The Mei-hua family of eight moved into Sanxia City. However,…
“I think that he is full and I am empty”.
Vassil and his friend Nikola are Slavic Macedonians born in Greece. In 1948 they were both little children when they were taken from their village and raised in an orphanage in Romania. Twenty eight thousand Greek and Slavic Macedonian children were taken from Greece by the Democratic Army, without their…
The Dutch anthropologist Ton Otto returns to the Melanesian island Baluan after the death of his adoptive father, Ngat. According to local tradition he has to participate in a mortuary ceremony together with his adopted siblings, but the ceremony, his father wanted him to do, has already been performed. Now Ton has to find out what would be an appropriate…
Nimble fingers belong to the Vietnamese women who work in factories owned by some of the most popular electronic brands. Bay is one of the thousands of young migrant workers. She comes from a remote Muong village on the highlands of Northern Vietnam. Now she lives, with the other workers, in a Hanoi suburb, a district developed around one of…
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…
Perma gold mine, Benin. Some dream to find something, others realized there was nothing to be found. Some dig relentlessly hoping to become rich, others died in the process. And a few of them say that here, nobody dies.
Sicily, summer. A wall of barbed wire separates the biggest refugee camp in Europe from a deserted, unwelcoming hinterland. The camp is the CARA of Mineo. Here migrants are blocked in endless waits, with their lives dotted with dreamy, absurd, even comical situations.
Near the camp fence we meet Mohammad, who wants to run away; Aqib and Malik who dream…
Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival is a very important event for rock n’ roll bands in Taiwan. Starting from 2000, Taipei county organizes the contest annually, providing young gifted musicians an opportunity to demonstrate their talents. The fourth festival was held in the summer of 2003. During the three-day festival, the Indie Music Awards was the most interesting activity that attracted most…
The film shows life and work on two farms in Zeeland, a province in the Netherlands. Here, a few farmers, for different reasons, have chosen to keep on working with cart-horses of the Belgian ‘Underbred’-race. These huge and heavy horses, with their calm and friendly character were traditionally used in this region because of the heavy clay. Nowadays, all farmers,…
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…
This is a lyrical film about four children living in an orphanage in Xinjiang province, China. The children are Uighurs, members of China’s eight million strong largest Muslim minority. To prevent Uighur separatism, China enforces a policy of cultural and political assimilation in Xinjiang: religion is particularly targeted. (Human Rights Watch reports that 10 000 Uighurs are political prisoners, and…
A consulting service is located in the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny. It’s an outpost at the end of a corridor. A large, run-down room where sick men show up bearing physical scars, and whose pain seems closely linked to the suffering of exile. They keep coming back here because they still harbor hopes that this place will give them the means…
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…