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…