Documentary Educational Resources (Firm)

This short documentary explores China's burgeoning African entertainment industry through the lives of three African hip-hop artists who are trying to find success in the face of challenging labor and immigration laws in China's southeastern city of Guangzhou. The film follows the entertainers as they prepare for their shows, perform, and live their daily lives with their Chinese and African family members and friends.

Christianity's explosive growth in Africa was totally unexpected at the dawn of independence from colonial rule and is part of a startling reversal in world history. Christianity is no longer the religion of the West. Over two-thirds of the world's Christians now live in the global South - with Africa growing the fastest.. With guidance from leading scholars, these films document the vitality and changing nature of Christianity in Africa. They explore...

A Kalahari Family is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. These once independent hunter-gatherers experience dispossession, confinement to a homeland, and the chaos of war. Then as hope for Namibian independence and the end of apartheid grows, Ju/'hoansi fight to establish farming communities and reclaim their traditional lands. The series challenges stereotypes of...

An American Mosque is a film about Islam in America, religious intolerance, and the interfaith response to an historic hate-crime. When the Islamic Center of Yuba City, California, was burned to the ground in 1994, it was the first arson to destroy a mosque in US history. At the time, this incident was largely ignored. Now, decades later, this symbolically important story is revisited. Late one night, arsonists broke into the newly-constructed mosque,...

The Screening Room Series from Documentary Educational Resources.

Year after year, Sanabhai brings his family to a seasonal saline desert in Gujarat India, where they harvest what they proudly proclaim to be the world's whitest salt, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Hardship and exploitation loom large in this film, but director Farida Pacha lets this speak for itself, instead fixing her gaze on the poetry and ritual of Sanabhai and his family's existence. Exquisite camerawork...

Send in the Clowns follows performers from the organization Clowns Without Borders. Their mission is to travel to areas of crisis and relieve stress and suffering through laughter. The clowns are volunteers, armed with a unique set of skills and an earnest desire to change the world. But is their work any different from all of the other agenda-driven aid organizations? In 2009 the clowns go to Haiti, a country known as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere...

Among the Senufo people of northern Cote d'Ivoire, the balafon (xylophone with calabash resonators) is an emblematic musical instrument. Returning to Senufo country 40 years after his first encounter with balafon music in 1958, ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp recalls memories of this and subsequent visits in the early 60s, before participating in a musical event of startling impact.. Six orchestras, playing simultaneously but independently, circle with...

Jean-Michel Kibushi Ndjate Wooto (also know as Kibushi Ndjate Wooto ) is a pioneer of African animation, and is widely considered to be the first Congolese animator. This compilation brings together five of his best-known works from 1991 to 2004.. While all use stop motion animation, Kibushi draws widely on materials - from jointed paper cutouts, to clay, to puppetry to children's drawings - set against elaborate backgrounds to convey poignant social...

Filmmaker Timothy Asch and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon collaborated to study and film the Yanomamo Indians. The setting for most of these films is the remote village of Mishimishimabowei-teri, a village whose history and inhabitants Chagnon knew well. Several figures in particular are outstanding: Moawa, a village headman and Dedeheiwa, another headman and the leading shaman