Indigenous Peoples
OVID presents a collection of films about indigenous people from around the world. From documentaries about Native Americans, like MORONI FOR PRESIDENT and AMÁ, to films like Charlie's Country about Aboriginal Australians, this collection explores and celebrates the range of experiences had by cultures around the world.
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Dreams from the Outback
Directed by Jannik Splidsboel • Documentary • 2019 • 79 minutes
Once, Australia discussed whether Aboriginals belong to fauna or to human beings. Today in the Kimberley, home to various Aboriginal communities, most are in transition, causing limbo and distress. Some have given up; others choose ...
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Night Cries
Directed by Tracey Moffat • Drama • With Marcia Langton, Agnes Hardwick, Jimmy Little • 1991 • 19 minutes
On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their...
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10th Parallel
Directed by Silvio Da-Rin • Documentary • 2011 • 87 minutes
10th PARALLEL takes us on a 300-mile journey up Brazil's Envira river into the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, to the frontier of a territory populated by the country's uncontacted indigenous tribes. Our guide is Jose Carlos Meirelles, ...
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Sun Kissed
Directed by Maya Stark & Adi Lavy • Documentary • 2012 • 85 minutes
For fifteen years Dorey and Yolanda Nez thought they were the only family on the Navajo Reservation who had children with an extremely rare genetic disorder that only shows up at a rate of one in a million in the general populat...
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Dam/Age
Directed by Aradhana Seth • Documentary • 2002 • 50 minutes
"I suddenly realized… I command the space to raise a dissenting voice, and if I don't do it, it's as political an act as doing it… to stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out."- Arundhati Roy, Author of Booker Prize Winner The ...
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The Modern Jungle
Directed by Charles Fairbanks and Saul Kak • Documentary • 2017 • 71 minutes
The Modern Jungle is a portrait of globalization filtered through Carmen and Juan, two Zoque people, and how modernity has affected their identity and relation to the indigenous culture. This film documents their strugg...
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Trinkets and Beads
Directed by Christopher Walker • Documentary • 1996 • 52 minutes
After twenty years of devastating pollution produced by oil companies in the Amazon basin of Ecuador, a new kind of oil company - Dallas based MAXUS - promises to be the first company to protect the rainforest, and respect the peop...
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Bedevil
Directed by Tracey Moffatt • Drama • 1993 • 90 minutes
BEDEVIL is the stunning debut feature from Tracey Moffatt (NIGHT CRIES, NICE COLORED GIRLS) and the first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal an...
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Ama
Directed by Lorna Tucker • Documentary • 2019 • 74 minutes
Ama tells an important and untold story: the abuses committed against Native American women by the US Government during the 1960s and 70s. The women were removed from their families and sent to boarding schools. They were subjected to fo...
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Profit and Loss
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2014 • 57 minutes
From New Guinean rainforests to Canada's tar sands, PROFIT AND LOSS exposes industrial threats to native peoples' health, livelihood and cultural survival. In Papua New Guinea, a Chinese-government owned nickel mine has violently r...
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How to Build an Igloo
Directed by Douglas Wilkinson • Documentary • 1949 • 10 minutes
A demonstration of igloo-building in Canada's Far North, showing how the site is selected and how blocks of snow are used to make a snug shelter in only an hour and a half. As the camera follows each stage, the commentary explains t...
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Last Cab to Darwin
Directed by Jeremy Sims • Drama • With Michael Caton, Jacki Weaver, Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Emma Hamilton, Mark Coles Smith • 2014 • 123 minutes
Rex is a cab driver who has never left the mining town of Broken Hill in his life. When he discovers he doesn’t have long to live, he decides to drive t...
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Coming to Light
Directed by Anne Makepeace • Documentary • 2000 • 84 minutes
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was a driven, charismatic, obsessive artist, a pioneer photographer who set out in 1900 to document traditional Indian life. He rose from obscurity to become the most famous photographer of his time, create...
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In the Light of Reverence
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2001 • 73 minutes
Across the USA, Native Americans are struggling to protect their sacred places. Religious freedom, so valued in America, is not guaranteed to those who practice land-based religion. Every year, more sacred sites - the land-based eq...
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The Mystery of Chaco Canyon
Directed by Anna Sofaer • Documentary • 1999 • 56 minutes
THE MYSTERY OF CHACO CANYON examines the deep enigmas presented by the massive prehistoric remains found in Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. It is the summation of 20 years of research. The film reveals that between 850 and 1150 A...
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Fire and Ice
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2014 • 57 minutes
From Ethiopia to Peru, indigenous customs protect biodiversity on sacred lands under pressure from religious conflicts and climate change. In the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia, scientists confirm the benefits of traditional stewardshi...
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Islands of Sanctuary
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2014 • 57 minutes
Native Hawaiians and Aboriginal Australians resist threats to their sacred places in a growing international movement to defend human rights and protect the environment. In Australia's Northern Territory, Aboriginal clans maintain ...
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Nice Colored Girls
Directed by Tracey Moffatt • Drama • With Gayle Mabo, Cheryl Pitt, Janelle Court • 1987 • 16 minutes
This stylistically daring film audaciously explores the history of exploitation between white men and Aboriginal women, juxtaposing the “first encounter” between colonizers and native women with ...
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Apache 8
Directed by Sande Zeig • Documentary • 2012 • 57 minutes
For 30 years, the all-female Apache 8 unit has protected their reservation from fire and also responded to wildfires around the nation. This group of firefighters, which recently became co-ed, soon earned the reputation of being fierce, lo...
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Pilgrims and Tourists
Directed by Christopher McLeod • Documentary • 2014 • 57 minutes
In the Russian Republic of Altai, traditional native people create their own mountain parks, to rein in tourism and resist a gas pipeline that would cut through a World Heritage Site. In northern California, Winnemem Wintu girls gr...
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Tribal Justice
Directed by Anne Makepeace • Documentary • 2017 • 87 minutes
TRIBAL JUSTICE is a feature documentary about a little known, underreported but effective criminal justice reform movement in America today: the efforts of tribal courts to create alternative justice systems based on their traditions. ...
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We Still Live Here
Directed by Anne Makepeace • Documentary • 2011 • 56 minutes
Celebrated every Thanksgiving as the Indians who saved the Pilgrims from starvation, and then largely forgotten, the Wampanoag Tribes of Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard are now saying loud and clear, and in their Native tongue, 'As Nuta...
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Patrimonio
Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, Sarah Teale • Documentary • 2017 • 83 minutes
A multi-billion dollar American development is poised to engulf a small coastal community in Mexico with a mega hotel/condo complex. But local people are banding together to save their way of life and the delicate ecosyst...