Carts of Darkness

Murray Siple's feature-length documentary follows a group of homeless men who have combined bottle picking with the extreme sport of racing shopping carts down the steep hills of North Vancouver. This subculture depicts street life as much more than the stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The film takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk. Shot in high-definition and featuring tracks from Black Mountain, Ladyhawk, Vetiver, Bison, and Alan Boyd of Little Sparta.

Unsettled: From Tinker to Traveller

Forty years ago two USF anthropologists George and Sharon Gmelch lived for one year in a barrel top wagon with travellers on a halting site in Dublin. Four decades later they have returned to Ireland with a huge archive of photographs to find the people they once knew to learn what has happened in their lives in the intervening years. When the Gmelch's first came to Ireland in 1970 accommodation for travellers was a big issue. They were young anthropology students looking for an area of Irish culture to study. They became interested in travellers and soon they were living among them in order to study their culture close up. They carried out some of the first academic research into travellers and published a number of books including 'The Urbanisation of an Itinerant People', 'Tinkers and Travellers' and 'Nan-The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman'. Now, in their mid 60's, the Gmelchs return to a very different Ireland to undertake their final 'field study' with Irish Travellers.

Earthdream 2000

 

Europe 1988: Mutoid Waste founder Robin Mutoid conceives a journey across the Australian desert, which will fuse a 'mader than Max' blend of theatre. protest, lifestyle and performance. 12 years later Robin heads to Port Augusta in Australia's far south to see who will answer the call. Those who come will be challenged on every conceivable level on their 20,000km journey, bringing them together as a community and allowing them all to participate in a fascinating study into 'lateral human governance'. Sometimes violent, often humorous and always passionate, this is their story.

Life With Nomads (Kate Humble Documentary Series)

 

The first in a series of three documentaries (all featured here) where British journalist Kate Humble lives with different nomadic groups still practicing their traditional life. In this first episode Kate lives with the Mongolian nomads from the secluded Hugh land steppe, where she will learn about the challenges faced by these ancient nomadic tribes.

Kate Humble and a camera crew enter the rugged and nomadic life of the Nepalese Raute people, roaming the altitudes of Nepal's mountains. They are not immediately welcomed into the tribe but as Kate proves helpful in moving the camp and as a contributing part of the workforce, she is able to get closer to the tribe - and by that closer to an understanding of the Raute people's way of life, including the challenges and possible new lessons for Kate to learn.

In Afghanistan, Kate Humble meets traditional shepherds in the remote Wakhan Corridor.

A nomad (late 16th century: from French nomade, via Latin from Greek nomas, nomad- ‘roaming in search of pasture’, from the base of nemein ‘to pasture’) is a member of a community without fixed habitation which regularly moves to and from the same areas. Such groups include hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads (owning livestock), and tinkers or trader nomads. In the twentieth century, population of nomadic pastoral tribes slowly decreased, reaching to an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world as of 1995.

Nomadic hunting and gathering—following seasonally available wild plants and game—is by far the oldest human subsistence method. Pastoralists raise herds, driving or accompanying in patterns that normally avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover.

Nomadism is also a lifestyle adapted to infertile regions such as steppe, tundra, or ice and sand, where mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. For example, many groups living in the tundra are reindeer herders and are semi-extra nomadic, following forage for their animals.

Sometimes also described as "nomadic" are the various itinerant populations who move among densely populated areas to offer specialized services (crafts or trades) to their residents—external consultants, for example. These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads".

Vali's World (1984)

Filmed in New York, Positano, and Naples, featuring Vali Myers, George Plimpton, Gianni Menichetti, and Arden Mason. Directed by Caterine Milinaire. Music by Arden Mason. Telltale Associates Inc. © 1984 Vali Myers (1930-2003) was an Australian born, global artist who lived the natural world through an artistic and magical vision. Vali embodied her art in a total awareness of her surroundings and its experience. She bonded with animals and people on a single level. Her art production is a mapping of these worlds where spirits evolve and communicate with each other through forms.

The Oblivion Seeker - Isabelle Eberhardt

 

Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable. - Isabelle Eberhardt

Actress Juliet Stevenson retraces the journeys of turn-of-the-century traveler and writer Isabelle Eberhardt. BBC, 1994.

Isabelle Wilhelmine Marie Eberhardt (17 February 1877 – 21 October 1904) was a Swiss explorer and author. As a teenager, Eberhardt, educated in Switzerland by her father, published short stories under a male pseudonym. She became interested in North Africa, and was considered a proficient writer on the subject despite learning about the region only through correspondence. After an invitation from photographer Louis David, Eberhardt moved to Algeria in May 1897. She dressed as a man and converted to Islam, eventually adopting the name Si Mahmoud Saadi. Eberhardt's unorthodox behaviour made her an outcast among European settlers in Algeria and the French administration.

Eberhardt's acceptance by the Qadiriyya, an Islamic order, convinced the French administration that she was a spy or an agitator. She survived an assassination attempt shortly thereafter. In 1901, the French administration ordered her to leave Algeria, but she was allowed to return the following year after marrying her partner, the Algerian soldier Slimane Ehnni. Following her return, Eberhardt wrote for a newspaper published by Victor Barrucand and worked for General Hubert Lyautey. In 1904, at the age of 27, she was killed by a flash flood in Aïn Séfra.

Isabelle was a journalist and war correspondent. Her disguise helped her to penetrate the peoples of the Sahara to get to know their customs. In Aïn Sefra she met Lyautey, a general charged with the task of reestablishing order on the border between Algeria and Morocco. With him, Isabelle was able to enter the camps and observe the conflicts first-hand. Not only did she disguise herself as a man, she also observed military discipline and was treated the same way as the other soldiers. In 1904 Isabelle she met up with her husband in Aïn Sefra and in a flash flood their clay house collapsed on top of them. “I know that this way of life is dangerous, but the moment of danger is also the moment of hope,” she wrote. She published many articles during her lifetime, and after her death her diaries and fiction were published.

Yasmina et Autres Nouvelles by Isabelle Eberhardt translated by Ahcene Douas

Isabelle Eberhardt: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nomad by HEDI ABDEL-JAOUAD

Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt at The Paris Review

Urga / Close to Eden (1991)

Urga / Close to Eden is a 1991 film by Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov. It is released in North America as Close to Eden. It depicts the friendship between a Russian truck driver and a Mongolian shepherd in Inner Mongolia. The film was an international co-production between companies based in Russia and France. Click on the image above to watch the entire film.

The Mongolian shepherd Gombo lives in a yurt in Inner Mongolia with his wife, three children, and mother. They are content with their uncomplicated rural lives but Gombo wants to go on having sex with his wife, while she refuses herself in fear of bearing a fourth child, which is against the Chinese law. A Russian truck driver named Sergei is stranded nearby, and finds his way to their house, where he and Gombo become friends despite their language and cultural differences.

Gombo and Sergei go into the nearest city together, where Gombo is supposed to buy contraceptives (condoms). Instead he buys a television set and other such goods, then attempts to buy contraceptives, but decides not to when he realizes everyone at the drugstore is a woman. Sergei, a former army bandsman, sings "Hills of Manchuria" in a nightclub, as the band plays from the sheet music tattooed on his back. He is arrested and then bailed out of jail by Gombo.

Gombo returns home, and along the way stops and takes a nap. He has a strange dream featuring his drunken, horse riding relative as Genghis Khan and his wife as Ghenghis Khan's wife. In the dream both he and Sergei are captured and killed. Gombo wakes and arrives home, with the television, and he and his family watch alternately the President of America speaking and a badly sung variety show. Gombo and his wife go into the fields, bringing the Urga (a long stick with a lasso on the end used to capture animals) which is then stuck into the ground far away in the prairie, a signal that a couple is being intimate. A voice over from Gombo's fourth son concludes the film with the image of a chimney belching smoke into the air in the place where Gombo's Urga was once placed.