Dry Box VHS Tapes

A short film about the relationship between an Aboriginal daughter and her white mother. The daughter, now the sole carer of her dying mother, dreams of far away places, the haunted look in her eyes loaded with a sense of what could have been. Famous Aboriginal singer, Jimmy Little, sings 'Royal Telephone', evoking the presence of Christianity and its role in the assimilation of Aboriginal people. The final scene sees the daughter lying in a foetal position next to her mother, crying. Assimilation, then, can be understood as a pain experienced by both the Aboriginal daughter as well as the white mother.

A faceless traveller takes a journey through the barren reaches of a Siberia caught between tradition and modernity, imparting his philosophical musings on its people and places, wildlife and culture.

Nice Coloured Girls is a short film classic by Tracey Moffatt, one of Australia's foremost visual artists. Three Aboriginal women cruise through Kings Cross and pick up a 'captain' (a drunken white man). They encourage him to spend his money on them and to drink until incapacitated while they steal his wallet and race off to catch a cab, self-satisfied. Nice Coloured Girls contrasts the relationship between Aboriginal women and white men in the past and present.

A stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers, and psychiatrists.

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

Come Back, Africa chronicles the life of Zachariah, a black South African living under the rule of the harsh apartheid government in 1959.

This intimate ethnographic study of Voudoun dances and rituals was shot by Maya Deren during her years in Haiti (1947-1951); she never edited the footage, so this “finished” version was made by Teiji Ito and Cherel Ito after Deren’s death.

1967 film directed by D. A. Pennebaker

90min
A brilliant documentary about a unique set of people.
Joe Leahy is the half-caste son of one of the first explorers of the Papua New Guinean interior. His relations with the local Ganiga tribe who work his coffee plantation on their land are difficult at times. However he has successfully managed to get them to agree to open a second plantation in partnership with him. Things are looking up until the international coffee market hits rough times and conflict seems imminent between the Ganiga and their neighbouring traditional enemies.

An African travels to Paris to learn about the construction of tall buildings, but is soon taken up with the oddities of French life.

Demonstrates how over 70 years Trobrianders have ingeniously adapted the missionary-introduced game of cricket to the needs of their society.

Imagine what it would be like if black settlers arrived to settle a continent inhabited by white natives? In 1788, the first white settlers arrived in Botany Bay to begin the process of white colonisation of Australia. But in Babakiueria, the roles are reversed in a delightful and light-hearted look at colonisation of a different kind. This satirical examination of black-white relations in Australia first screened on ABC TV in 1986 to widespread acclaim with both critics and audiences alike. This is the story of the fictitious land of Babakiueria, where white people are the minority and must obey black laws. Aboriginal actors Michelle Torres and Bob Maza (Heartland) and supported by a number of familiar faces from the time, including Cecily Polson (E-Street) and Tony Barry, who starred in major ABC-TV hits such as I Can Jump Puddles and his Penguin award-winning Scales of Justice. Babakiueria was awarded the United Nations Media Peace Prize in 1987.

This is a documentary about direct-cinema from its very beginnings (Nanook of the North) to the fake-direct-cinema of the Blair Witch Project. All the important direct-cinema filmmakers are portrayed and/or interviewed: Leacock, Wiseman, Maysles, Pennebaker, Reisz and others.

The film's title is borrowed from a Dani fable that Gardner recounts in voice-over. The Dani people, whom Gardner identifies mysteriously as "a mountain people," believe that there was once a great race between a bird and a snake, which was to determine the lives of human beings. Should men shed their skins and live forever like snakes, or die like birds? The bird won the race, dictating that man must die. The film's plot revolves around two characters, Weyak and Pua. Weyak is a warrior who guards the frontier between the land of his tribe and that of the neighboring tribe. Pua is a young boy whom Gardner depicts as weak and inept.

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.

Tony Buba, a film maker from Braddock, Pennsylvania, tells the story of his hometown's decline (along with the rest of the steel mill towns along the Monongahela River) while he dreams of making higher budget films. The picture documents, in a lighthearted way, the community anxiety and activism that accompanied the failure of the steel industry around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.