In the Gambia, West Africa, locals have a name for foreigners; they call them "Tubabs" a term derived from "two bob", the standard fee British colonialists used to pay Gambians for odd jobs. In this film we follow a group of students from St. Mary's College in Maryland on a summerlong jaunt deep into the Gambia to study West African language and culture. The result is a story about a group of American teenagers traveling outside their comfort zones...

In her startling, exquisitely shot Hello Photo, documentarist Nina Davenport turns the conventions of the travelogue inside out. She takes us to India and abandons us there, leaving us to believe what we see through her eyes. Her movie replicates the experience of being a traveller and thus a voyeur, of taking in sights without necessarily understanding their meaning.

At a street festival in West Africa, a young girl is delighted to discover a video camera trained on her. But her exuberant display is quickly cut short when she recognizes that the cameraman has already lost interest in her. But all is well: he has a document of the moment. Video has tipped the balance in another human interaction, and turned it into a curio.

Each summer for the past one hundred years, local residents on an otherwise tranquil block in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn turn their lives upside down for two weeks in order to host the reenactment of a centuries-old religious pageant. The annual feast of San Paulino di Nola has its roots in an archaic fertility rite with exotic pagan undertones. Italians from the Campanese village of Nola, who emigrated to Williamsburg in the 1880's, brought...

Lobsang Tsundu is a 13 year old Tibetan boy living and studying to be a monk (Lama) in Kopan monastery, situated on a little hill at the edge of Katmandu valley. Following Tibetan tradition, Tsundu, the middle son, was chosen by his parents to be a monk.

In the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Enga people have developed the art of body decoration as a visual language. Using earth paints, tree oils, bird plumes, human hair, and a variety of plants, the Enga turn the body into a medium for an expressive and dramatic symbolism.

Stoney says he has dumb luck. His grandfather was the doctor on the island in Ireland where the legendary maker of documentary film, Robert Flaherty, shot his film Man of Aran. So Stoney's film, exploring the effects Flaherty's film had on the island and its people, is digging into his own roots as an individual while simultaneously studying the work of his intellectual mentor as a producer of nonfiction films.Robert Flaherty's 1934 classic Man of...

In the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, French anthropologist Maurice Godelier invites five of his Baruya friends and informants to his house to discuss Baruya kinship and rules of marriage. As Godelier poses questions, the kinship rules that provide the cohesive fabric of Baruya culture are brought to life.

This documentary is about a group of non-Native women's search for self in "other". The focus is on a specific group of New Age women in Ojai, California who construct a new sweat lodge and perform their own ceremony.

The Last Rites of the Honourable Mr. Rai is a film about the cremation of a longtime resident of the holy city of Varanasi. This film, made at the request of the Rai family, is possibly the most detailed and respectful study of the Hindu rites of cremation on the sacred banks of the river Ganga at the historic Harish Chandra Ghat. With no invasive narration but with inter-titles and subtitles the film enables the viewer to see, hear and experience...