Tracing Roots
Similar Movies
0.0Augusta(en)
This short documentary is the portrait of an 88-year-old woman who lives alone in a log cabin without running water or electricity in the Williams Lake area of British Columbia. The daughter of a Shuswap chief, Augusta lost her Indian status as the result of a marriage to a white man. She recalls past times, but lives very much in the present. Self-sufficient, dedicated to her people, she spreads warmth wherever she moves, with her songs and her harmonica.
3.0My Name is Hungry Buffalo(cs)
Jan calls himself Buffalo. He loves cowboys, he’s blind, and may lose his hearing. The documentary follows his journey to America to visit the chief of the Navajo tribe, who wants to perform a ritual to help his hearing. The film is full of unpretentious humor thanks to Jan’s charisma. In the USA, he’s like the Don Quixote of the Wild West - a naive adventurer in a world that is much more ordinary than his imagination. This observational, but not standoffish, film is also an example of how the medium of film can relate to blind people by constantly showing the difference between what Jan perceives and what we actually see.
7.6Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World(en)
Documentary about the role of Native Americans in popular music history, a little-known story built around the incredible lives and careers of the some of the greatest music legends.
9.0Pacific Mother(en)
Pacific Mother journeys from Japan, to Hawaii, Tahiti, Rarotonga and Aotearoa to share interwoven stories of formidable women who live at one with the Pacific Ocean – freediving, spearfishing and paddling waka through its depths and playing with their children in its shallows – a stark contrast to fast-paced lifestyles of larger towns or cities. These women are all mothers who experienced diverse births in hospital, at home and by the sea, with and without medical assistance. Fukumoto also meets Māori and Japanese midwives who share indigenous traditions and rituals around birth that have been lost over recent generations, and are now gradually being reclaimed. Their stories demonstrate just how disconnected the global default maternity system is from the instinctive and cultural needs of mothers and families. They inspire a call to action on birthing rights, as well as a call for parents’ reconnection with their role as nurturers and protectors of their natural environment.
0.0Bettina Rheims(fr)
Whether famous or anonymous, stars or prisoners, models or sex workers, women have always been at the center of Bettina Rheims' photographic work since her debut in 1978. Both subversive and glamorous, trashy and sophisticated, her photographs mark and bear witness to the upheavals of the era, which this leading photographer both anticipated and accompanied.
0.0Voices of Muslim Women from the US South(en)
When one thinks of the American Deep South, the image of veiled Muslim students strolling the University of Alabama campus is the last thing that comes to mind. VOICES OF MUSLIM WOMEN FROM THE US SOUTH is a documentary that explores the Muslim culture through the lens of five University of Alabama Muslim students. The film tackles how Muslim women carve a space for self-expression in the Deep South and how they negotiate their identities in a predominantly Christian society that often has unflattering views about Islam and Muslims. Through interviews with students and faculty at Alabama, this film examines representations and issues of agency by asking: How do Muslim female students carve a space in a culture that thinks of Muslims as terrorists and Muslim women as backward?
0.0The Shaman's Apprentice(en)
Scientist Mark Plotkin races against time to save the ancient healing knowledge of Indian tribes from extinction.
8.0Fragments(fr)
Women’s voices rise to deliver testimonies of victims of sexual violence. By reconstructing a story with these fragments of experience, a societal portrait is painted throughout the documentary. Like a mosaic, the pieces stick together to build a unique story that could belong to any human.
Yellowtail(en)
Yellowtail is the story of a young Native American cowboy searching for meaning as his chaotic lifestyle begins to wear on him both physically and mentally. To find his purpose the young man has to reflect on his upbringing as a native to become the spiritually connect man he was meant to be.
4.3Two Spirits(en)
Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition - the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits.
0.0Mabel(en)
Feisty, fiercely independent and firmly rooted in place, 90 year-old Mabel Robinson broke barriers back in the 40s when she became the first woman in Hubbards, Nova Scotia, to launch her own business—a hairdressing salon where she still provides shampoo-n-sets over 70 years later. Weaving animation and archival imagery with intimate and laugh out loud moments in the salon, the film celebrates the power of friendship, doing what you love and staying active. With no desire to retire anytime soon, Mabel gives voice to a generation who are not front and center of cinema or the pop hairstyles of the day, and subtly shifts the lens on our perception of beauty and the elderly.
0.0Cry Rock(en)
In the Bella Coola Valley, a haunting legend endures through generations as a filmmaker reckons with whether the stories of her ancestors can survive being held or if they were never meant to be captured.
0.0Rosies of the North(en)
They raised children, baked cakes... and built world-class fighter planes. Sixty years ago, thousands of women from Thunder Bay and the Prairies donned trousers, packed lunch pails and took up rivet guns to participate in the greatest industrial war effort in Canadian history. Like many other factories across the country from 1939 to 1945, the shop floor at Fort William's Canadian Car and Foundry was transformed from an all-male workforce to one with forty percent female workers.
6.2Women & the Wind(en)
Shot over the course of 30 days at sea, filmmaker Alizé Jireh documents the group’s voyage across the North Atlantic—from moments of stillness and calm to the chaos of storms and setbacks. With an observational approach and an eye for the emotional and physical rhythms of life at sea, Jireh captures not just the external landscape, but the internal shifts that come with navigating the vast unknown.
4.5INAATE/SE/(en)
INAATE/SE/ re-imagines an ancient Ojibway story, the Seven Fires Prophecy, which both predates and predicts first contact with Europeans. A kaleidoscopic experience blending documentary, narrative, and experimental forms, INAATE/SE/ transcends linear colonized history to explore how the prophecy resonates through the generations in their indigenous community within Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. With acute geographic specificity, and grand historical scope, the film fixes its lens between the sacred and the profane to pry open the construction of contemporary indigenous identity.
6.2Lakota Nation vs. United States(en)
Poet Layli Long Soldier crafts a searing portrait of her Oyate’s connection to the Black Hills, through first contact and broken treaties to the promise of the Land Back movement, in this lyrical testament to resilience of a nation.
0.0Sacheen: Breaking the Silence(en)
Revisiting the achievements of Sacheen Littlefeather, the first woman of color to utilize the Academy Awards to make a political statement.
2.0While The Night Falls(es)
An intimate portrait of the lives of Delvys and Carlos, siblings who live alone with their elderly mother in a rural part of a small Cuban town. The film portrays a family engulfed in their inner worlds. Between the sacrifices they make out of love for those who are present, and their longing for things that are absent, they struggle to find meaning as they reflect, contemplate, and carry the weight of existence, trying together, to move forward.
5.7Broken Rainbow(en)
Documentary chronicling the government relocation of 10,000 Navajo Indians in Arizona.
0.0Freedom of Inês Etienne Romeu(pt)
August 29, 1979, Talavera Bruce Penal Institute, Bangu, Rio de Janeiro. After serving eight years in prison, Inês Etienne Romeu, the only survivor of the "House of Death" in Petrópolis and the first political prisoner sentenced to life in prison in Brazil, left prison benefiting from Amnesty. Norma Bengell filmed this moment: from the prison door to her home with her family, Inês was welcomed by family, friends and members of the Brazilian Amnesty Committee, in what marked the first act of the historic denunciation that Inês would carry out against her tormentors and the Military Regime.
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BBC Arena's documentary on the Dames of British Theatre and film featuring Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Joan Plowright on screen together for the first time as they reminisce over a long summer weekend in a house Joan once shared with Sir Laurence Olivier.
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From the heights of her modeling fame to her tragic death, this documentary reveals Anna Nicole Smith through the eyes of the people closest to her.
7.6A Plastic Ocean(en)
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6.4Ex Libris: The New York Public Library(en)
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8.0My Mom Jayne(en)
Through deeply personal interviews with her siblings and an examination of the photographs, letters, and belongings left behind, Mariska assembles a new portrait of her mother Jayne Mansfield, an extraordinary and complex woman.
6.4The Last Blockbuster(en)
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7.3A Secret Love(en)
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7.9John Candy: I Like Me(en)
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7.2Unknown: Cave of Bones(en)
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