Nkumi, everyday life

This documentary looks at the stories of a few people in Aspen Colorado and how they contribute to the community.

The film tells the story of ancient Ingush lullabies - Ingush women and men tell the lullabies of their families and the stories associated with them: love, friendship, blood feud.

This provocative and profound film documents the Choqela ceremony, an agricultural ritual and song of the Aymara Indians of Peru. By offering several different translations of the proceedings, the film acknowledges the problems of interpretation as an inherent dilemma of anthropology.

Le dernier poumon du monde

The modern history of the Congo, the heart of Africa, is a terrifying tale of appalling brutality: how the greedy and incredibly ruthless King Leopold II of Belgium (1935-1909) turned a vast country into his private estate (1885-1908) and how he plundered the land and raped the bodies and souls of its defenceless inhabitants, causing countless victims; and what exactly is the true impact of this often forgotten story of crime and horror today.

The film tells two parallel stories. One, set in the present, tells of a pagent about the conquest of America, while the other, set in the 15th century, tells of a group of conquistadors coming ashore searching for gold. The film takes place in an unnamed country.

Ñaalec (Fabián Valdez) is a Moqoit college student disenchanted with formal ways of learning and embarrassed by his drunken classmates. He seeks to recover his people's culture by learning from elders who still remember the old ways. Ñaalec travels to the Nanaicalo Nqote ("eye of the dragon"), a sacred lake whose water gave people the power of the gods. This docudrama is part of a series of community-created films supported by CEFREC (led by Iván Sanjinés, son of legendary Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés).

35 Cows and a Kalashnikov is a joyously made triptych about warrior-farmers, colorful dandies and voodoo wrestlers in Ethiopia, Brazzaville and Kinshasa. It paints a loving and attentive portrait of African pride and beauty.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast, mineral rich country the size of Western Europe. Alastair Leithead takes an epic journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the far reaches of the Congo river to explore how history has shaped the Congo of today and uncover the lesser told stories of this beautiful, if troubled country. In the largest rainforest outside of the Amazon he comes face to face with its gorillas and hunts with pygmies, he travels into the heart of the Ebola outbreak with United Nations peacekeepers, and explores the cobalt mines which will drive our electric cars of the future.

Along an overgrown rail track south of the Zairean town Kisangani, a UN expedition together with a handful of journalists discover “lost” refugees. They are eighty thousand Hutus from far away Rwanda, the last survivors of three years of hunger and armed persecution that transpired throughout the vast Congo basin. The Hutu-refugees leave the forest, gathering in two gigantic camps. Hundreds of refugees die every day from diseases and malnutrition The Rwandans are promised repatriation with airplanes out of Kisangani. The film traces those refugees into the heart of the rainforest, and the hopeless attempts to help them.. But only four weeks later, the unprotected UN-camps are again attacked by machine-gun fire, deliberately massacred by factions of the rebel army (AFDL) of today’s Democratic Republic Congo. Eighty thousand men, women and children disappear once again back into the jungle. (jedensvet.cz)

A meditative stroll through Sacramento landmarks, from the gentrified to the urban.

Short ethnographic documentray about Arba'een, a Shia Muslim religious observance

Over 6,000 men served and 19 fell in the Congo Battalion (1960-64), Sweden's most dramatic and contentious UN operation. Many of the participants have borne the experience as a lifelong, well-hidden trauma. A visit to the Congo after fifty years causes some of them to finally open up and tell the things that they haven't even been able to say to their closest family.

The Greek shadow puppetry began 130 years ago. A student of Greek shadow puppetry travels to China, where shadow puppetry began over 2000 years ago. There he follows Chinese shadow puppeteer master He Shihong in Wushan of China. Watching his performances and listening to him talk about his art and his career in it, many parallels are drawn and he expresses them by including his Greek shadow puppetry teacher in the film. This documentary is a cultural bridge between Greece and China through the art of shadow puppetry.

A musical oddessy through the heart of Africa in search of the roots of Rock & Roll.

As if they were showing their film to a few friends in their home, the Johnsons describe their trip across the world, which begins in the South Pacific islands of Hawaii, Samoa, Australia, the Solomons (where they seek and find cannibals), and New Hebrides. Thence on to Africa via the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, North Africa, and the Nile River to lion country in Tanganyika. (They are briefly joined in Khartum by George Eastman and Dr. Al Kayser.) Taking a safari in the Congo, the Johnsons see animals and pygmies, and travel back to Uganda, British East Africa, and Kenya.

A visual travel diary on the expedition led by Brondeel in 1934. This expedition to Belgian Congo, by truck, became a testimony to the social conditions of Africans during the colonial era.

A chronicle of the violence that occurred in much of the African continent throughout the 1960s. As many African countries were transitioning from colonial rule to other forms of government, violent political upheavals were frequent. Revolutions in Zanzibar and Kenya in which thousands were killed are shown, the violence not only political; there is also extensive footage of hunters and poachers slaughtering different types of wild animals.

Since the late 1990s, more people have died in war-torn Congo than in any conflict since World War II. In addition to the dead, hundreds of thousands of woman and girls have been raped. Rape, explains a British colonel, is a weapon of war, part of a destabilization covering the theft of valuable minerals. Rape victims are traumatized, injured, abandoned by husbands, pregnant, and ravaged by disease.

The critically important work by renowned naturalist Claudine Andre to save the endangered bonobo apes of the Congo is presented in this visually stunning feature film.