Sensory Ethnography Documentaries
Documentary films made by Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab.
List to be updated soon.
Sources:
https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/
List to be updated soon.
Sources:
https://sel.fas.harvard.edu/
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- DirectorLucien Castaing-TaylorVerena ParavelStarsBrian JannelleAdrian GuilletteArthur SmithA documentary shot in the North Atlantic and focused on the commercial fishing industry.
- DirectorLibbie Dina CohnJ.P. SniadeckiA mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind window into modern China, PEOPLE'S PARK is an exhilarating single shot documentary that immerses viewers in an unbroken journey through a famous urban park in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. PEOPLE'S PARK was produced at Harvard's groundbreaking Sensory Ethnography Lab, which has been responsible for some of the most critically-acclaimed, envelope-pushing documentaries of recent years (including SWEETGRASS, LEVIATHAN, and the upcoming MANAKAMANA.) The film explores the dozens of moods, rhythms, and pockets of performance coexisting in tight proximity within the park's prismatic social space, capturing waltzing couples, mighty sycamores, karaoke singers, and buzzing cicadas. A sensory meditation on cinematic time and space, PEOPLE'S PARK offers a fresh gaze at public interaction, leisure and self-expression in today's China.
- DirectorIlisa BarbashLucien Castaing-TaylorIn the summer of 2003, a group of shepherds took a herd of sheep one final time through the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, in the extreme north-west of the United States. It was a journey of almost three hundred kilometres through expansive green valleys, by fields of snow, and across hazardous, narrow ridges - a journey brimming with challenges. The aging shepherds do their very best to keep the hundreds of sheep together; the panoramic high mountains are teeming with hungry wolves and grizzly bears.
- DirectorStephanie SprayPacho VelezStarsChabbi Lal GandharbaAnish GandharbaBindu GayekA documentary about a group of pilgrims who travel to Nepal to worship at the legendary Manakamana temple.
- DirectorJ.P. SniadeckiIn northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work. Through a series of interchanging and overlapping vignettes, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki presents a full range of the river's value: from couples who fly kites or play cards by its shoreline, to fishermen who drag nets through its waters, to a vendor who relies on its attraction as a popular destination to sell his pinwheels. The river is a place containing multitudes, where a woman cleans up every single piece of trash along the bank, and a boy plays in the sand and drinks from a stagnant river pool littered with debris. Filmed only one year after a major chemical spill (one of the largest river spills in recent years), Songhua is at once a tender record of interactions with the natural waterway, and a subtle, but dark consideration of the societal and environmental implications of the river's condition.
- DirectorJ.P. Sniadecki'Chaiqian' (demolition) is a portrait of urban space, migrant labor, and ephemeral relationships in the centre of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in western China. Attending first to the formal dimensions of the transforming work-site - including the demands of physical labor and the relationship between human and machine - the film shifts focus to the social dynamics of a group of thirty people who have come from the countryside to work in this ever-changing urban landscape. In exploring the various banal yet striking interactions between these members of China's 'floating population', the city's residents, and the film-maker, 'Chaiqian' simultaneously expresses and resists the fleeting nature of urban experience.
- DirectorXiang HuangJ.P. SniadeckiRoutao Xu'Yumen' combines ghost stories and the 'ruin tourism' to form a celluloid psychocollage of wandering souls, seeking connection to each other and a lost collective history among the frozen remnants of the abandoned oil town of Yumen in China's north-west Gansu province.
- DirectorJ.P. SniadeckiStarsWoseser TseringFilmed over three years on what will soon be the world's largest railway network, 'The Iron Ministry' traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, language and gesture.
- DirectorVerena ParavelJ.P. Sniadecki'Foreign Parts' portrays a hidden enclave of automobile shops and junk-yards fated for demolition in the shadow of a new baseball stadium in Queens. The film observes this vibrant community of immigrants - where wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce - as it struggles for daily survival and contests New York City's development scheme.