Related Guides
Film Resources
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume III: Indigenous Voices This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. III: Indigenous Voices contains documentaries, feature films and shorts made by and for indigenous people and communities. Topics are simultaneously local and global, with particular emphasis on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume IV: Festivals and Archives This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. IV: Festivals and Archives contains award-winning titles from contemporary ethnographic film festivals. The collection also includes field recordings and edited films by students and faculty from universities and institutions around the world, including Berkeley Media and Manchester's Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition contains a curriculum-aligned collection of videos and segments curated to support the teaching of introductory anthropology courses. Each video and segment within this collection are accompanied by a teaching guide providing background information, lesson plans, and classroom exercises and activities.
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- EVIA Digital Archive Project The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a collaborative endeavor to create a digital archive of ethnographic field video for use by scholars and instructors. Funded since 2001 by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with significant contributions from Indiana University and the University of Michigan, the Project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts.
- Centre of South Asian Studies: Films (University of Cambridge) The Centre holds a sizable archive of films – approximately 50 individual collections totalling in the region of 80 hours of footage. Most of the material we hold is 16mm or 8mm home movies, taken between 1911 and 1956. The film collection is now available online in its entirety (with one or two omissions for copyright purposes).
- Penn Museum Anthropological and Archaeological Films (University of Pennsylvania) In its 120-year history, the University of Pennsylvania Museum has collected nearly one million objects, many obtained directly through its own field excavations or anthropological research. This collection on the Internet Archive represents a portion of the motion picture film collection housed at the Museum.
- Canada's Diverse Cultures, National Film Board of Canada The first films on cultural communities in Canada were made at the NFB in the 1940s. They seem quaint to us today, concentrating on ancestral customs, religious beliefs, crafts, dress and traditional dance and music. The films say nothing about what drove these people to move here or what difficulties they faced, and consisting as they do of narration and music, they give no voice to the communities they represent. These films wanted to show that Canada was an open and tolerant country where many cultures could co-exist.
- Indigenous Cinema, National Film Board Canada Free streaming to 200+ short and feature-length films by indigenous directors, produced from 1968 onwards.
- The Aboriginal Voice: The National Film Board and Aboriginal Filmmaking Through the Years Through its singular and long-standing commitment to Aboriginal filmmaking, the National Film Board has been instrumental in providing Canadians a rich cultural resource and legacy: a comprehensive body of films inviting us all to share in the Aboriginal experience. Throughout the course of a number of NFB initiatives, the Aboriginal Voice has evolved.
- BU Libraries Search (BULS) This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of academic material provided by the library. The material covered by the search includes books, journals, scores, video and audio recordings, and other physical items held by the library. The search also covers ebooks and ejournals owned by the library, as well as online material provided by the library from a variety of sources.
- Journal of Anthropological Films For the first time in the history of Visual Anthropology anthropological film can now be published on par with written articles, assessed by peers, and inscribed in international credential systems of academic publication as the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) has launched this first edition of Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF)
Featured Films
- The art of documentary filmmaking (streaming, Academic Video Online) At the end of 2005, Anglo-Burmese filmmaker Lindsey Merrison brought together eight tutors well-versed in documentary from Europe and Australia with twelve young Burmese men and women for a three-week workshop entitled "The Art of Documentary Filmmaking." The venue was a quiet hotel in Myanmar's capital, Yangon.
- Seven Blind Women Filmmakers (streaming, Academic Video Online) In Spring 2004, Mohd Shirvani decided to answer an old question in his mind - What should I do if I, as a film director, would become blind? I was wondering if I could keep making films. This film has been made by a number of blind women filmmakers to answer that question. I taught them how to narrate their own stories through film language with small digital cameras and they also taught me how to see the world with my third eye on my forehead. The result of this experience is a feature episodic documentary 7 Blind Female Filmmakers.
- The Color of Paradise (streaming, Academic Video Online) This film tells the story of Mohammad, who after a year in Tehran learning to read Braille, returns to his village with his widowed father. His father fears that a blind son will prevent him from marrying again, so he puts Mohammad into an apprenticeship program as a carpenter. The Color of Paradise is a painfully beautiful film about a blind boy's ability to see more than others who are bound by tradition and religion.
- Nimeh-ye penhan (The Hidden Half) (streaming, Academic Video Online) Fundamentalists in Iran objected to the sympathetic portrayal of those who fought against the Islamic Revolution in Tahmineh Milani's controversial film. It is a story of a woman remembering her affair with a married man in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Shah. Farsi dialog with English subtitles.
- First contact : filmmaker interviews (streaming, Academic Video Online) This Nine Network (Australia) television program called Sunday, discusses and shows excerpts of the classic feature length film, First contact, showing cultural confrontation that is as compelling today as when it was first released in 1982.
- Chronicle of a Summer (streaming, Kanopy) The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin termed cinèma- vèritè is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France. Simply by interviewing a group of Paris residents in the summer of 1960, beginning with the provocative and eternal question Are you happy? and expanding to political issues, including the ongoing Algerian War, Rouch and Morin reveal the hopes and dreams of a wide array of people, from artists to factory workers, from an Italian èmigrè to an African student.
- A Separation (dvd) A Tehran housewife desirous of a better future for her 11-year-old daughter, seeks to emigrate. While her husband is sympathetic, he can't bring himself to leave his Alzheimer's-afflicted father. As they start to divorce out of necessity, the husband hires an impoverished woman as a caregiver, and the stage is set for a complex tragedy to play out in open court.
Featured Podcasts
- DER Podcasts DER’s mission is to distribute, produce, and support ethnographic and documentary media that foster cross-cultural understanding and empathy, and prioritize underrepresented voices.
- This Anthro Life: 100 Years of Beauty and the Beast of YouTube with Chris Chan Adam and guest host Leslie Walker talk with visual anthropologist and film producer Chris Chan, producer of the 100 Years of Beauty series on YouTube. If you haven't seen this series (or some of the spinoffs from companies like Vogue and Allure, definitely take a few minutes to enjoy). As an ethnographer, he also makes a wonderful behind-the-scenes series that documents the research he and his team does for each country called Chanthropology.
- This Anthro Life: The Connected Cup What is it about coffee and tea - two simple drinks - that both transcends culture and is intimately bound up by it? In this episode, Adam talks with Independent documentary filmmaker and coffee anthropologist Brooke Bierhaus about her film "The Connected Cup" which explores the heart of coffee and tea as global human connectors across cultures and backgrounds. For the film Brooke traveled to over 9 countries to film and capture intimate moments, stories, and portraits of human life around the connected cup.
