Movies: Anthropology

Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nig...

A departing professor gathers his closest colleagues for an intimate farewell, but the night takes an unexpected turn when he shares a stunning secret about his past. As the conversation unfolds, skepticism and curiosity collide, challenging everythi...

Maggie's plan to have a baby on her own with a sperm donor is derailed when she falls in love with John, an older married professor, destroying his volatile marriage to the brilliant and impossible Georgette. But three years later, married to John wi...

After squandering his grant money, despondent and recently widowed anthropologist James Krippendorf must produce hard evidence of the existence of a heretofore undiscovered New Guinea tribe. Grass skirts, makeup, and staged rituals transform his thre...

An exploration of the heavy metal scene in Los Angeles, with particular emphasis on glam metal. It features concert footage and interviews of legendary heavy metal and hard rock bands and artists such as Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Megadeth, Motör...

A massage therapist looking to overcome her addictions and reconnect with her son, whose father is an anthropologist in South America studying the Yanomani people, moves in with a wealthy ex-client in New Jersey....

Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth....

The film discusses the traits and originators of some of metal's many subgenres, including the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, power metal, Nu metal, glam metal, thrash metal, black metal, and death metal. Dunn uses a family-tree-type flowchart to d...

A team of Arctic researchers find a 40,000 year-old man frozen in ice and bring him back to life. Anthropologist Dr. Stanley Shephard wants to befriend the Iceman and learn about the man's past while Dr. Diane Brady and her surgical team want to dis...

The Amazon rain forest, 1979. The crew of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film directed by German director Werner Herzog, soon finds itself with problems related to casting, tribal struggles and accidents, among many other setbacks; but nothing compared to dr...

Mexico, 1985. Juan and Wilson, two perennial Veterinary students, perpetrate an audacious heist in the National Museum of Anthropology, running away with a loot of more than hundred invaluable pieces of Mayan art, unaware of the consequences of their...

Wild girls at a college pay more attention to parties than their classes. But when one party girl, Stella Ames, goes too far at a local bar and gets in trouble, her professor has to rescue her. Gossip linking the two escalates until Stella proves she...

Somewhat based on Desmond Morris's fascinating book of pop anthropology, this partially animated satirical docudrama produced by Playboy Magazine publisher Hugh Hefner, traces the evolution of human kind and offers insight into the reasons why we beh...

What happens when western anthropologists descend on the Amazon and make one of the last unacculturated tribes in existence, the Yanomami, the most exhaustively filmed and studied tribe on the planet? Despite their "do no harm" creed and scientific a...

Do animals have feelings? Empathy even? A documentary with some insights due to advancing technology....

In 1935, German scientists dug for bones; in 1943, they murdered to get them. How the German scientific community supported Nazism, distorted history to legitimize a hideous system and was an accomplice to its unspeakable crimes. The story of the Ahn...

The Kumiho family circus in town -- and with it, apparently, a mysterious murderer. The members of motherless family aren’t helping their case with their strange remarks about humans and their initial performances, cavalcades of dismemberment and tor...

This documentary follows three couples to see how things turned out several years after their weddings. The film presents challenging ideas about relationships, as it answers the question: Why is marriage so difficult?...

An unprejudiced portrait of Spanish folklore and a crude analysis in black and white of its intimate relationship with atavism and superstition, with violence and pain, with blood and death; a story of terror, a journey to the most sinister and ances...

This film is a portrait of unique cultural space for Spirits, Gods and People. While permanent theatres are commonly built in most cosmopolitan modern cities, Hong Kong preserves a unique theatrical architecture, a Chinese tradition that has lasted m...