Documentary Educational Resources

Kafi Dixon dreams of starting a land cooperative for women of color who have experienced trauma and disenfranchisement in the city of Boston. By day she drives a city bus; at night she studies the humanities in a tuition-free course. Her classmate Carl Chandler, a community elder, is the class’s intellectual leader. White suburban filmmaker James Rutenbeck documents the students’ engagement with the humanities. He looks for transformations but is awakened to the violence, racism and gentrification that threaten Kafi and Carl's very place in the city. Troubled by his failure to bring the film together, he enlists the pair as collaborators with a share in the film revenues. Five years on, despite many obstacles, Kafi and Carl arrive at surprising new places in their lives—and James does too.

A tale, told by his five daughters, of the life and death of a man very representative of a Protestant Switzerland in the early 20th century where life was conditioned by the work ethic. He was first a farmer, then a factory worker, then the head of a small family affair where his daughters became his workers. The business grew into an large factory that would be eventually taken over by the only son. The five stories show us the family and professional context of the first half of the 20th century. They are also five different versions of the serene death of a man who felt he had done his duty. The film illustrates the ideas of Max Weber, known for their importance in understanding the Western civilization that emerged from the Reformation.

A Calling to Care is the inspiring story of 55 year-old Grace Stanley, a Canadian nurse who left her home and prestigious career behind to answer a calling halfway around the world in Karachi, Pakistan. Teaching nursing to local women in a strict Muslim culture that forbids them to even to touch men is a formidable task. However, Grace challenges her own values and belief systems to find common ground with her students, helping them to excel and feel respect for themselves in a culture that doesn't respect them. Whether it is getting her hands painted with henna, swimming fully-clothed in the ocean, or marching bravely with them on International Women's Day, Grace bonds with her students in a very special way, and ultimately discovers how the West can learn a lot more from the Third World than she ever thought.

The time is early autumn. The woman wakes and dresses the boy. He practices with his sling while she spreads a caribou skin to dry. The boy picks berries and then the men come in their kayak with another caribou. This is skinned, and soon night falls. In the morning, one man leaves with his bow while the other makes a fishing mannick, a bait of caribou meat. The woman works at the skins, this time cleaning sinews and hanging them to dry. The man repairs his arrows and then sets a snare for a gull. The child stones the snared gull and then plays hunter, using some antlers for a target. His father makes him a spinning top. Two men arrive at the camp and the four build from stones a long row of manlike figures, inukshult, down toward the water. They wait for caribou and then chase them toward the stone figures and so into the water where other men in kayaks spear them. The dead animals are floated ashore and skinned.

It is late autumn and the Eskimos travel through soft snow and build karmaks, shelters with snow walls and a roof of skins, in the river valley. The geese are gone but some musk-ox are seen. The man makes a toy sleigh from the jawbones of a caribou and hitches it to a puppy. Next day the women gather stocks of moss for the lamp and the fire. The men fish through the ice with spears. The woman cooks fish while the men cache the surplus. Then the family eats in the karmak. The men build an igloo and the household goods are moved in. They begin the complicated task of making a sleigh, using the skins from the tent, frozen fish, caribou antlers and sealskin thong. The woman works at a parka, using more caribou skin, and the children play. Now the sled is ready to load and soon the family is heading downriver to the coast.

Two Eskimo families travel across the wide sea ice. Before night falls they build small igloos and we see the construction in detail. The next day a polar bear is seen basking in the warming sun. A woman lights her seal oil lamp, carefully forming the wick from moss. The man repairs his snow goggles. Another man arrives dragging a polar bear skin. The boy has made a bear-shaped figure from snow and practices throwing his spear. Then he tries his bow. Now, with her teeth, the woman crimps the sole of a sealskin boot she is making. The men are hunting seal through the sea-ice in the bleak windy weather. The wind disturbs the "tell-tales," made of eider down or a hair loop on a bone, that signal when a seal rises to breathe. A hunter strikes, kills and drags his catch up and away. At the igloo the woman scrapes at a polar bear skin and a man repairs a sled. In the warming weather the igloo is topped with furs and a snow shelter is built to hide the sled from the sun.

Inside the Khmer Rouge takes an in-depth look at the history, domination, and current status of the Khmer Rouge (a Communist regime) in Cambodia. The film features revealing interviews with soldiers of both the modern Khmer Rouge and those who fight in opposition. A comprehensive timeline of the regime's five-year occupation in Cambodia is dissected and includes a review of key individuals, ideologies, and locations where devastation hit hardest. Following this, the film takes a look at the effects on the Cambodian citizens upon the retraction of Vietnamese forces. Inside the Khmer Rouge continues to investigate the current tactics the modern Khmer Rouge implement and their attempts to persuade followers in order to rebuild and expand their regime. Oppositely, local forces or "jungle soldiers" discuss their devices for assuring the destruction and atrocities once caused by the Khmer Rouge never happen again.

Roach and Starbuck, two hardcore punks from Montreal, try to form their own political party, but run out of time due to Canada's electoral process. Instead, they decide to campaign for political office as independent candidates in a rich Montreal district called Outremont.

These films reveal the live reality of traditional Eskimo life before the European acculturation. The Netsilik Eskimos of the Pelly Bay region in the Canadian Arctic had long lived apart from other people and had depended entirely on the land and their own ingenuity to sustain life through the rigors of the Arctic year. The filming was done during the summers of 1963 and 1964 and in the late winter of 1965 under the ethnographic direction of Dr. Asen Balikci of the University of Montréal, assisted by Guy Mary-Rousseliere, O.M.I., both anthropologists of wide Arctic experience. Quentin Brown was Producer-Director, and Kevin Smith the Executive Producer for the series. A minimum of cultural reconstruction was required during the filming; the Netsilik families readily agreed to live in the old way once more and showed considerable aptitude in recalling and representing the earlier ways of life.

FIRST FILM was edited and narrated by Lorna Marshall and is comprised of footage shot in 1951 on the second Marshall family expedition to the Kalahari Desert. It is intimate in style, very carefully filmed, with a wealth of practical information about the material culture and structure of Ju/'hoan (!Kung Bushmen) hunter-gatherer society. The film allows viewers to see some of John Marshall's earliest film footage and provides an interesting comparison with the more sophisticated shooting found in his later work.

After decades struggling to protect her ancestors' burial places, now engulfed by San Francisco's sprawl, a Native woman from a federally unrecognized tribe and her allies occupy a development site to prevent desecration of sacred ground. When this fails to stop the development, they vow to follow a new path: to establish the first women-led urban Indigenous land trust. BEYOND RECOGNITION tells the inspiring story of women creating opportunities to preserve Native culture and homeland in a society bent on erasing them. Through cinema verite, interviews, and stunning footage of the land, the film introduces Corrina Gould, Johnella LaRose, and Indian People Organizing for Change as they embark on an incredible journey to transform the way we see cities. The film invites viewers to examine their own relationship to place, revealing histories that have been buried by shifting landscapes.

Kalliopi Kalogerou has spent her whole life in the Greek village of Ano Ravenia where she was born in 1900. Simple witness of the century, she lived through Turkish domination and successive occupations linked to different wars. Most of her family stays elsewhere, in Greece or abroad (USA, Canada, Germany, Bulgaria); her shattered family world is representative of the Greek diaspora. The film is exclusively devoted to her life story, told to a young Epirot friend, Eleni Pangratiou-Alexakis, and to her daughter, Evguenia, both of whom have settled in the States. The result is a rich, yet austere film where nothing distracts the viewer from the dialogue and the face of the storyteller. It also constitutes an ordinary yet important testimony on this long and painful page of Greek history (1900-1983).

This film explores the minds of former suicide bombers who participated in the first well-orchestrated suicide mission in modern history, the one carried out by the air arm of the Imperial Japanese Navy during WWII. Although in the beginning, these suicide pilots were university graduates and intellectual elites in their 20s, by 1942 the Navy was aggressively recruiting a large number of boys who were only in their low teens. Fortunately, some never flew their final suicide mission because the war ended before it was their turn to fly out.

The once thriving industrial town of Haverhill, Massachusetts on the Merrimack River now resembles, in the words of one of the film's subjects, "a ghost town where you expect to see tumbleweeds come rolling down Main Street." This film examines a dying industrial town and its politicians' search for votes over such issues as municipal spending, rising taxes, the revitalization of depressed areas, and attracting new industry. The film's central event is the 1976 Mayoral election. Election scenes are intercut with comments from Haverhill residents, members of a local foundation, political scientist Frances Fox Piven, the president of the local union, and the shoe manufacturers themselves. The oral history which surrounds the election footage is a reservoir of information about Haverhill's present condition as well as its past.

This film will help to introduce rebetiko, a relatively unknown musical form outside of Greece, to an international audience. It includes musical and dance performances of rebetika songs, archival footage, and interviews with the friends, relatives and colleagues of Markos Vamvakaris. This documentary not only creates a vivid portrait of a man, but also presents us with a social and historical framework of Greece during the first 70 years of the 20th century.

Ano Ravenia, a mountain village in Greece, young men leave to find work, learn a trade or serve in the Army while a young woman may leave her father's house only to enter that of her husband. The unmarried girls remain in the village amoung the elderly folk, meeting together to embroider their trousseaus and chat. In a rural Greek community, it is not the role of women to express their point of view in public. The film allows the spectator to sit in one of these casual sewing sessions where the girls talk about their wishes and problems, most of which revolve around marriages that will change their lives.

The hopes, fears, and aspirations of adolescence are expressed in the close friendship of two Afghan boys. As their acceptance of the filmmakers leads them to express their feelings more and more openly, the film grows rich in fact and themes of universal concern. Filmed in the Balkh Province, an area inhabited by Tajik and other Central Asian peoples. The town of Aq Kupruk is approximately 320 miles northwest of Kabul.