Arcadia Public Library

Australia's most internationally renowned documentarists (Kildea, O'Rourke, Connolly/Anderson) are part of a group of expatriates who honed their documentary filmcraft while residents of Papua New Guinea. Their films, brimming with wit and character, capture the energy and contradictions of a country in transition from a backward colony, to a young nation in the modern world.

Ju/'hoan farming communities multiply during the 1980s only to face a new threat. The Department of Nature Conservation wants to create a game reserve on Ju/'hoan territory. People will be forbidden to raise livestock or crops. Instead, Ju/'hoansi will be encouraged to act like "Bushmen" and hunt for the amusement of tourists. Urgent grass roots organizing ensues as the people seek to control their traditional lands.

The Garifuna are a Central American people of West African and Native American descent. One of their most popular rituals is wanaragua, a three-fold system of masked Christmas processionals commonly called Jankunú. This ritual is a unique blend of African, European, and Native American (Arawak and Carib) art traditions in which social and cultural identities are expressed through music, dance, and costume.

In the highlands of Northern Columbia the Ika live a strenuous and isolated life, economically dependent on small gardens and a handful of domestic animals. They are thought to be descendants of the Maya who fled from the turmoil of Central American High Civilizations warring states to the remote valleys of Colombias Sierra Nevadas.

For thousands of years Ju/'hoansi have lived in the Nyae Nyae region in northeastern Namibia. In the 1950s, most Ju/'hoansi had been exterminated or were dispossessed by white colonists and black farmers, but in Nyae Nyae Ju/'hoansi were still the only permanent inhabitants.

The Video in the Villages project introduces video among the Enauênê Nauê Indians, a group still isolated in the north of Mato Grosso. The 10th group to have been visited by the project, these Indians are very extroverted and respond with surprising, high-spirited performances.

The Hamat'sa (or "Cannibal Dance") is the most important-and highly represented-ceremony of the Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) people of British Columbia. This film traces the history of anthropological depictions of the dance and, through the return of archival materials to a First Nations community, presents some of the ways in which diverse attitudes toward this history inform current performances of the Hamat'sa.