Our annual series features an international array of recent and historical documentaries and nonfiction films.
Read full descriptionIn this selection of documentary and ethnographic films, women filmmakers from Lebanon, Senegal, Tanzania, and the United States employ different stylistic approaches and modes of address to depict women’s experience and work.
The members of the Australian Indigenous media group the Karrabing Film Collective use cell phones and handheld cameras to record daily life in their rural community as a form of grassroots resistance.
Yãmĩyhex, The Woman-Spirit is “a film haunted by a myth, inhabited by the careful construction of rituals and celebration, moved by the force of a spiritual bond with every manifestation of life” (Sheffield DocFest).
In Fad’jal, the groundbreaking Senegalese-French filmmaker and ethnologist Safi Faye investigates traditions of storytelling through a beautiful portrait of her ancestral farming village.
Born in France to Senegalese parents, Alice Diop (Saint Omer) brings a unique perspective to migrant and Black diaspora experience. Influenced by Jean Rouch and Frederick Wiseman, she makes films that bring those on the periphery to the center.
One of the most influential ethnographic films of the 1960s, Dead Birds is director Robert Gardner’s interpretation of life among the Dani people of West Papua. With shorts from his Baliem Valley 1961 series.
This fascinating sonic ethnography, which draws on the audio archive from Robert Gardner’s 1961 expedition to West Papua, is “a mind-expanding inquiry on anthropology” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times).
Mexican Tzotzil filmmaker Xun Sero’s Mamá is “an extraordinarily sensitive first film where both mother and son open a dialogue in an attempt at self-discovery” (HotDocs).
Billy Woodberry’s “daring and accomplished documentary” (New Yorker) of Bob Kaufman, one of the most overlooked of the Beat Generation artists, is lovingly assembled from archival footage, documents, and interviews. With an homage to Ousmane Sembène’s Black Docker.
Cosponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies
“A hazy daydream of a film,” Eami is “equal parts nature doc and choral poem, an experimental memory essay that’s also an urgent elegy for a people, a forest, a world” (Variety). With Paz Encina’s sound piece Traéme Agua, Traéme Miel.
In Indian director “Payal Kapadia’s kaleidoscopic, Cannes prize-winning documentary . . . love for the moving image—and love for artistic creativity—marches hand in hand with the fight for political freedom” (Guardian). With a short by Amit Dutta.