Movies: Ethnomusicology

Sha//ge, a very young woman about to have her first child, falls ill, probably with malaria. /Ti!kay, a relative and healer, enters a mild trance, without the stimulus of dancing, in an attempt to cure her. Sha//ge lives but the baby is stillborn....

The sound of centuries-old Adhan in Turkey, the sound of centuries-old church bells and the polyphonic music of Europe echo in our memory. Our traditions and our future determine our present. In the present tense, the sounds of the war's sirens are m...

The tragic story of an American music virtuoso who found in 1970s Iran the love and acceptance he never received back home, and who was punished by his country upon his return after the Iranian revolution....

A documentary about the traditional music of the 'Are'are people of the Solomon Islands....

The dance house movement, which (illegally) brought folk music from the minority Hungarian Gypsies and peasants of Transylvania - now part of Romania - to Budapest, and its effect on views of the value of traditional culture....

Documentary film Heavy Heart arose as a part of ethnomusicological research Silalo panori / Cold water (2014 – 2017) of ancient Roma songs. These songs are usually connected with memories and experiences of their interprets. Documentary in a mosaic-...

This classic documentary features the story and sounds of the talking master drums of the Ashanti. Filmed in Ghana and narrated by Mantle Hood...

Amir, shot during the height of the Afghan civil war in the 1980s, investigates and portrays the life of Afghan refugees living in and around the city of Peshawar in northern Pakistan through the experiences of the musician Amir. The aspirations of A...

British musician and writer David Toop leads viewers through a tour of his voluminous record collection, reflecting on perception, the limits of music and the connections between seemingly disparate performers. This unusual documentary from filmmaker...

For most of the last decade Laurent Jeanneau has been on an urgent mission to record as much as he can of the surviving music of ethnic minorities in South East Asia. Small Path Music takes us traveling in the field with Laurent. What drives him to t...