The Shipibo-Konibo people of Peruvian Amazon decorate their pottery, jewelry, textiles, and body art with complex geometric patterns called kené. These patterns also have corresponding songs, called icaros, which are integral to the Shipibo way of life. This documentary explores these unique art forms, and one Shipibo family's efforts to safeguard the tradition.
Follows Martin Strel as he attempts to cover 3,375 miles of the Amazon River in what is being billed as the world's longest swim.
The people of Unamenshipu (La Romaine), an Innu community in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec, are seen but not heard in this richly detailed documentary about the rituals surrounding an Innu caribou hunt. Released in 1960, it’s one of 13 titles in Au Pays de Neufve-France, a series of poetic documentary shorts about life along the St. Lawrence River. Off-camera narration, written by Pierre Perrault, frames the Innu participants through an ethnographic lens. Co-directed by René Bonnière and Perrault, a founding figure of Quebec’s direct cinema movement.
When Masset, a Haida village in Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), held a potlatch, it seemed as if the past grandeur of the people had returned. This is a colourful recreation of Indigenous life that faded more than two generations ago when the great totems were toppled by the missionaries and the costly potlatch was forbidden by law. The film shows how one village lived again the old glory, with singing, dancing, feasting, and the raising of a towering totem as a lasting reminder of what once was.
Survivors firsthand accounts of the wild times, the 72 hours leading to the crash, the crash itself & its aftermath.
Air Disasters exposes some painful truths behind the world of flight, using actual footage of real incidents to look at why planes crash; in aerodynamic and technical terms and in the way the industry is run.
Explorer Bruce Parry visits nomadic tribes in Borneo and the Amazon in hope to better understand humanity's changing relationship with the world around us.
TOKYO Ainu features the Ainu, an indigenous people of Japan, living in Greater Tokyo (Tokyo and its surrounding areas), who are and actively in promoting their traditional culture in a metropolitan environment away from their traditional homeland, Hokkaido. Shedding a common assumption that all Ainu live in Hokkaido, the film captures the feelings, thoughts and aspirations of Ainu people that who try to follow the Ainu way no matter where they live.
The last two surviving members of the Piripkura people, a nomadic tribe in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, struggle to maintain their indigenous way of life amidst the region's massive deforestation. Living deep in the rainforest, Pakyî and Tamandua live off the land relying on a machete, an ax, and a torch lit in 1998.
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Discovered about twenty years ago, the immense masses of water vapor that fly over the Amazon, called "flying rivers", fascinate researchers. Their future could be intimately linked to climate change.
Filmed in the jungles of Peru, shaman Don Jose Campos introduces the practices and benefits of Ayahuasca, the psychoactive plant brew that has been used for healing and visionary journeys by Amazonian shamans for at least a thousand years.
The historic gathering of three hundred indigenous activists from North, South and Central America who met in Quito, Ecuador, in July 1990 to organize a cross-continental indigenous resistance to the Columbus Quincentennial.
A polemic against Werner Herzog and the making of "Fitzcarraldo", exploring the question of the filmmaker's ethical and moral responsibility.
Shot in Venezuela over a 30-year period, this documentary depicts the life and work of José Maria Korta, the controversial Jesuit Missionary with the Ye'kwana people of the Amazon.
A documentary film about Comanche activist LaDonna Harris, who led an extensive life of Native political and social activism, and is now passing on her traditional cultural and leadership values to a new generation of emerging Indigenous leaders.
This short impressionist documentary looks at the creation of a Button Blanket by integrating the performance of a traditional dance with the art of the West Coast Heiltsuk Nation.
Explore the mysterious Amazon through the amazing IMAX experience. Amazon celebrates the beauty, vitality and wonder of the rapidly disappearing rain forest.
Finnish filmmaker and artist Sami van Ingen is a great-grandson of documentary pioneer Robert Flaherty, and seemingly the sole member of the family with a hands-on interest in continuing the directing legacy. Among the materials he found in the estate of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s daughter Monica were the film reels and video tapes detailing several years of work on realising her lifelong dream project: a sound version of her parents’ 1926 docu-fiction axiom, Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age.
50 years on, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy is the oldest continuing protest occupation site in the world. Taking a fresh lens this is a bold dive into a year of protest and revolutionary change for First Nations people.