Related Guides
Find Films & Images
Film & Sound Databases
- 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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- Ethnographic Sound Archives Online This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Sound Archives Online brings together over 2,000 hours of previously unpublished historic field recordings from around the world, alongside their supporting field notes and ethnographers' metadata, opening new paths for the study of music in its cultural context.
Image Databases
- Associated Press Images Collection This link opens in a new window Associated Press Images Collection is a searchable collection of recent and historical photos from the Associated Press, plus AP graphics, articles, and brief sound clips.
- ARTstor This link opens in a new window ARTstor is a database of images from museums, artists, libraries, colleges and universities, scholars, private collections, and photo archives available for teaching, education, and scholarship, with all images cleared for educational use.
- Travel Photos, Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History, Boston University Travel photos taken between about 1950 and 1990 in several Southeast Asian countries.
- SouthEast Asian Images & Texts, University of Wisconsin SouthEast Asian Images & Texts brings together, in digital form, two categories of primary and secondary resources: research and teaching materials collected by University of Wisconsin faculty and staff; and unique or valuable items related to these fields held by the University of Wisconsin Libraries. This collection contains digitized images, including photographs and slides.
- Southeast Asia Digital Library, Northern Illinois University The Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL) exists to provide educators and their students, as well as scholars and members of the general public, with a wide variety of materials published or otherwise produced in Southeast Asia.
- Philippine Photographs Digital Archive, University of Michigan The Digital photographs archive consists of over 2,100 images depicting Filipinos, buildings, dwellings, and monuments in and around Manila, Filipino political and military leaders, members of American commissions and military units based in the Philippines, and numerous landscape scenes, particularly on Mindanao and in Lanoa Province.
- Southeast Asia Visions A collection of European travel accounts of pre-modern Southeast Asia. Over 350 books and journals include some 10,000 images, drawings, photographs, prints and maps, many of them in color.
Browse Selected Films
- The Skinheads of Asia (streaming, Academic Video Online) THE SKINHEADS OF ASIA gives the viewer an astonishing insight into a group of Asians who have deliberately chosen a lifestyle that marginalizes them from mainstream society. he story also takes us to Hanover, Germany to examine the skinhead movement there. How are the German skinheads different from their Asian counterparts?
- ÐỜI CÁT = Sandy Lives (streaming, Academic Video Online) For twenty years, Camh has lived in North Vietnam, unable to return to his home in the south, a small fishing village where his wife waits for him. She has been a guerrilla fighter for the triumphant communist forces, and has made a living selling food in the market. She is happy to reunite with her husband until she learns that he has married a young woman in the north and has a child by her.
- Dancing Through Death (streaming, Academic Video Online) This is the story of Thavro Phim, who came of age under the Pol Pot regime and lost his father, brother, and grandfather to the blood thirsty Khmer Rouge. What kept him whole after the ordeal was his Buddhist faith and his dedication to Cambodian classical dance where he performs the role of Hanuman, the magical white monkey
- Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (streaming, Academic Video Online) How do you get news of oppression out into the free world when you are inside the nation run by the oppressors? By employing tactics like those practiced by the 30 video journalists--VJs--filming inside Burma during the well-organized 2007 uprising. As thousands of monks joined ordinary citizens raising their voices in protest, the Democratic Voice of Burma found ways to sneak the footage found in this incredible documentary out of the country.
- The Last Refuge (streaming, Academic Video Online) Relegated to remote reservations on the rugged slopes of Mt. Pinatubo, the Aetas, the original inhabitants of the Philippines have battled lowland expansion, commercial logging, and increasing encroachment on their ancestral land. They are struggling to survive and to preserve their ancestral culture. The Last Refuge was conceptualized in collaboration with anthropologist Dr. Ruffino Tima. It traces the history of this endangered tribe.
- A Double Death - The Akha of the Golden Triangle (streaming, Academic Video Online) Driven out of Tibet and the eastern Himalayas, the Akha have fought their way to the extreme north of Thailand and Burma. Hostile to outsiders, the Akha today are the living remnants of a former time, the bygone era of the Chinese Middle Empire. The Akha have a dangerously bad reputation: smuggling, destroying the forest, ignoring frontiers, growing opium. If they remain in the hills the Thaï will eventually destroy them, if they accept to go down to the valleys they will surely die of
- The Longest Struggle: The Karen of Burma (streaming, Academic Video Online) The Karen of Burma have been fighting a war for nearly half a century against the Burmese, whilst attempting to retain their traditional way of life. Sons and daughters who have never known peace follow parents and grandparents against one of the most repressive regimes in the world.
- Determination to Beat the US Aggressors (AM Explorer) Narrated in the first person, the film exhibits the process of fighting the US Army in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. The film starts with the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, when the US Army attacked Vietnamese Navy. Vietnamese across the country are determined to defend the nation from heavy bombings by US aircraft. Scenes include tracking news of the victorious DRV forces in newspapers, highlighting the heroism of people, and capturing a US pilot. Showing scenes of movements around the world showing solidarity with Vietnam, the film raises a solid belief in the final victory in the struggle against the US invaders.
- The Angkar (AM Explorer) Solemn documentary exploring the treatment of internees at Tuol Sleng prison in Cambodia during the regime of Pol Pot. [WARNING: distressing content and graphic images featuring the corpses of prisoners and children.] Featuring footage of political leaders and the empty prison, the film includes dozens of photographs of prisoners before and after torture, and shares official explanations of deaths from ledgers kept by guards.
- Australian Documentary Film Journalist Wilfred Burchett Visits Liberated Areas in South Vietnam (AM Explorer) Documentary following Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett on his visit to the liberated areas of South Vietnam. Includes footage demonstrating the guerrilla warfare tactics of the Vietnamese People's Liberation Front used against the US troops, and exploring the role and nature of journalism in Vietnam.
- Laos, Day and Night (AM Explorer) Documentary about the struggle of the Pathet Lao (or Neo Lao Hak Xat, the Patriotic Front) against the USA during the years 1966-1968. Includes footage of the Laos countryside showing the daily lives of civilians, including farming and education. Also features footage of the caves in which civilians lived and worked, with areas for printing books, sewing, and preparing medicines for an underground hospital
- Trading Women (dvd) This documentary by David A. Feingold enters the worlds of brothel owners, trafficked girls, voluntary sex workers, corrupt police and anxious politicians. Filmed in Burma, China, Laos, and Thailand, this film follows the trade in women in all its complexity and considers the impact of this "far away" problem on the global community. Narrated by actress Angelina Jolie, the documentary demonstrates the relationship of the trade in drugs to the trade of women.
- Surname Viet Given Name Nam (dvd) Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha's personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women histroically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and experiences of... Vietnamese women in Vietnam - from both North and South - and the United States, Trinh's film challenges official culture with the voices of women.
- Chain of Love (dvd) The demand for domestic help is increasing in the West because, in many families, both parents must work for economic survival. One consequence is migration: escalating numbers of women in the Third World are leaving their own children to take care of children in the West. This documentary by Marjie Meerman is about the Philippines' second largest export product - maternal love - and how this export affects the women involved, their families in the Philippines, and families in the West.
