Sounds of Love and Sorrow lets the eerie sounds of the Paiwan flutes including the nose flute, which legend says imitates the call of the deadly hundred-pace snake, mix in with the recollections of tribal elders and traditional tales to present a rich background of Paiwan life in Taiwan. Tribal elders recall the days of the youth and their romances.…
Southeast Asian Cinema When the rooster crows is a voice of diversity reaching for change. Brillante Mendoza, Eric Khoo, Garin Nugroho, Pen Ek Ratanaruang give voice to a region rich with traditions, ethnic groups, languages, politics, and religions. It is cinema, at its purest form, fighting for freedom of expression, documenting real lives of ordinary people, giving voice to the…
A wild flower power ride on the footprints of the Soviet hippie movement take you into the psychedelic underground of 1970s. In search of freedom and happiness under the thumb of political regimes a colorful crowd of artists, musicians, freaks, vagabonds and other long-haired drop-outs created their own system in the Soviet Union. Years later, a group of eccentric hippies…
The island is a place to nurture people and the ocean is the route for outsiders. It all started when a Dutch merchant ship broke into Liuqiu Island offshore of Taiwan in 1622 and began the Dutch colonial plunder of Taiwan.
The Indigenous People Action Coalition of Taiwan acts like the assembly of the reunited back then. They are writing…
This film touches on the sensitive issues of national and ethnic identity in Taiwan. In 1965, Chen Yao-Chi directed the first objective Taiwanese documentary, Liu Pi-Chia. The main character, Liu Pi-Chia, was press-ganged into the Nationalist army in the 1940s in China, and came over to Taiwan with President Chiang Kai-Shek. After several decades, we unexpectedly met Liu in a…
“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…
Suddenly Sami is a personal film about identity. During the director’s childhood and youth in Oslo her mother never told her about her indigenous Sami background in the Arctic area of Norway. Why didn’t she? And how can the director suddenly become Sami in the middle of life? And does she really want to?
In the 1950s the anthropologist David F. Pocock conducted fieldwork in Sundarana, central Gujarat, with a focus on the Patidar community. Sixty years later we returned to see what changed. Focusing on a young men’s search for a bride, this documentary is about a village’s intertwining with international forms of migration, seen from the perspectives of those who fail and…
A documentary that carries the words of Rupert Max Stuart, Arrernte Mat-utjarra Elder, his philosophies and message about passing culture on and keeping it alive.
Sunset to Sunrise is part of the Nganampa Anwernekenhe series produced by Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) Productions. Nganampa Anwernekenhe means ‘ours’ in the Pitjanjatjara and Arrernte lanuages, and the series aims to…
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,…
An unsentimental elegy to the American West, Sweetgrass follows the last modern‐day cowboys to lead their flocks of sheep up into Montana’s Absaroka‐Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. This astonishingly beautiful yet unsparing film reveals a world in which nature and culture, animals and humans, vulnerability and violence are all intimately meshed.…
In spite of the spread of Christianity and introduction of modern medicine, Taiwan’s indigenous peoples have always had a need for their traditional beliefs. For the people in these tribes, when they seek to know the wishes of the deceased, they can only find answers through the divination and rituals performed by shamans. Nowadays, shamans are becoming fewer in number,…
During the 88 flooding disaster, Taiwan received a donation from its ally in the Southern Pacific, a nation called Tuvalu. This defenseless nation of 26 square kilometers will be the first island nation to be submerged by the oceans once the sea level rises due to global warming. The director Huang Hsinyao left his hometown after the 88 flooding disaster…
Shot in the arid landscape of West Bali, Indonesia, Tajen, Balinese for cockfight, follows multiple narrative threads of this ancient spectacle–that of the blade, the rooster, the cockfighter. It is the moment when these elements come together during the bloody match that the real drama begins.
10/7 21:30
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (in South Dakota) declares a State of Emergency when youth suicide rates reach the highest levels in the country. A respected female elder leads the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s only suicide prevention team, while mentoring a group of suicide-survivor teenagers to find their voice, encouraging them to bring hope and awareness to the reservation.
In the Daliang Mountain region of Sichuan China, lives the ancient tribal Yi minority. Their priests are called Bimo.For hundreds even thousands of years, the Bimo have relied on memorized scriptures to communicate their people’s desires with the ghosts and spirits of the world.This film follows the story of three very different Bimos.
The Spell Casting Bimo comes from a…
The film follows the life of Gusti Ayu Suartini, a young Balinese woman with Tourette’s Syndrome, as she struggles to create a life for herself while coping with a society who doesn’t understand her disease, doctors with no cures, and a family that rejects her. Gusti has spent many years struggling to overcome the stigma and suffering that has resulted…
Legend has it that the capoeira player Besouro Mangangá summoned Bahia’s full magical power to seal his body from harm. Neither bullets nor knives could pierce his skin anymore. But his enemies knew that the act of love could remove this magical protection and so they sent him a beautiful woman. Even today, young men in Santo Amaro tell each…
In Taiwan, when talking about “old soldiers”, most people consider them as members of the Kuomintang (KMT), the political party that followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. In October 1949 after the KMT had lost the entire mainland, the Communist army invaded Kinmen Island. After three days of intense fighting, the Communists were defeated at Gu-ning-tou on the northwestern coast of…
The Ministry of Education has urged colleges and universities to establish a Bachelor’s Degree Program for Indigenous Peoples since 2003
But as far as positioning is concerned, this is not a general department , and there is no general department with at least seven full-time professors . Some of the Bachelor’s Degree Program for Indigenous Peoples ,there is not even…