The inconceivable face

Set against the vibrant spectacle of the jaripeo, a symbol of Mexican cowboy tradition and machismo, this story unveils a hidden world of queer desire and quiet rebellion. As glances and gestures disrupt the rigid norms of masculinity, the rodeo becomes a stage for our protagonists to navigate identity, community, and the search for belonging in an oppressively traditional space.

Through intimate narrations and evocative imagery, women across the Dominican Republic reflect on their experiences with forced motherhood and clandestine abortion. What does it mean to exist as a woman in a country where abortion remains criminalized without exception?

A Kellergasse – the cellar lane – is one of the distinguishing cultural and physical features of the winegrowing region Niederösterreich – Lower Austria. There are more than a thousand of them. Until recently, wine was not only stored in the Kellergasse, but pressed and fermented there as well. Today, the Kellergassen have less to do with occupation and more with recreation. A documentary by Georg Riha follows a year in the life of this valuable cultural legacy.

Through dances and games, migrant boys and girls who live in a shelter in Reynosa, on the US-Mexico border, shared their dreams and stories of hope with us.

When a Mongolian nomadic family's newest camel colt is rejected by its mother, a musician is needed for a ritual to change her mind.

Song is a story of the last Finnish rune singer and his pupil, and the comforting power of singing.

The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 - 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.

Cuerpos juzgados

The traditional healers in the Swiss and French mountains.

A record of the fight for legal abortion based on the Brazilian, Argentine and Colombian experiences.

Best friends travel though Latin America meeting shamans, experimenting with plant medicines, and wondering about what makes a life well-lived when one of them might have half the time to live it.

The horses in Denys Colomb Daunant’s dream poem are the white beasts of the marshlands of the Camargue in South West France. Daunant was haunted by these creatures. His obsession was first visualized when he wrote the autobiographical script for Albert Lamorisse’s award-winning 1953 film White Mane. In this short the beauty of the horses is captured with a variety of film techniques and by Jacques Lasry’s beautiful electronic score.

A stop-motion documentary that describes the artificial mummification (black and red mummies) of the Chinchorro culture, a pre-hispanic society of fishermen and hunter-gatherers who practiced funeral rites with sophisticated techniques for body preservation 7,000 years ago, originating on the Camarones coast of Chile.

In rural Kosovo, identical houses are built for family members working abroad, in the hope that they will one day return to settle in their old homeland.

Narrated by Academy Award winners Sissy Spacek and Herbie Hancock, River of Gold is the disturbing account of a clandestine journey into Peru's Amazon rainforest to uncover the savage unraveling of pristine jungle. What will be the fate of this critical region of priceless biodiversity as these extraordinarily beautiful forests are turned into a hellish wasteland?

In Papua New Guinea, pig tusks and shell money are currencies which can buy most things. Henry Tokubak’s dream is to create the first bank where traditional money counts as legal tender.

A short film homage to Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño for the Festival d'Art Independent PEPE SALES 2016.

Traditions during Easter holidays in the remote village of Grešnica. The film was a research project of the newly opened Ethnological Museum to preserve the disappearing customs at least on film for future generations.

An unhappy family in a remote village in Calabria: Luisa is at war with the world since day one. She is juggling odd jobs, her love for her children and granddaughter, and her feuding with her mother, brother, and sister-in-law. While the two women exchange insults and call in the cops, three elderly aunts, a tragicomic chorus, try in vain to keep the peace.

Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.