The Ordinary Madness of a Daughter of Ham

An anthropological study of a cargo cult in a fictitious self-marginalized commune, which existed next to the Moscow Ring Road - a highway that marks the boundaries of the Russian capital - and survived mainly on roadside trash. Although the road provided for their basic needs, the existence of the commune was extremely precarious and highly dependent on the roadway's fluctuations. This dependency led them to develop a cargo cult of the road.

A fortuitous meeting, late one afternoon, in the garden of the Tuileries, of one or two cameras, a tape recorder, and three cameramen/directors, Raymond Depardon, Jean Rouch, and Philippe Costantini.

Jean Rouch filmed this loving and humorous portrait of anthropologist and filmmaker Margaret Mead in September 1977 while he was a guest of the first Margaret Mead Film Festival. As both a friend and colleague, Rouch reveals a glimpse of the legendary Mead in her later years.

In February 1974, Pam Sambo Zima, the oldest of the priests of possession in Niamey, Niger, died at the age of seventy-plus years. In his backyard, the followers from the possession cult symbolically break the dead priest's ritual vases and cry for the deceased while dividing up the clothes of the divinities.

A seven-day initiation ceremony is documented in which two women undergo ritual healing following a diagnosis of spirit possession, presented without narration, intertitles, or explanatory commentary.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, "Moi, un noir" marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction". The film depicts an ordinary week in the lives of men and women from Niger who have migrated to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire for work.

Paris, summer 1960. Anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist and film critic Edgar Morin wander through the crowded streets asking passersby how they cope with life's misfortunes.

A film in four episodes presenting teenage girls chosen as representative of their country and our time, in Italy, France, Japan and Canada. In spite of the stylistic peculiarities of the filmmakers, we find in each of them the same desire not to affirm anything, not to judge, but to quite simply show.

Jaguar, a kind of road movie on foot, tells of the journey of three friends, Damouré, Lam and Illo, on their way to the Gold Coast where they hope to make a fortune in order to return to their village in a few months.

Filmed in Paris in 1964, this documentary short follows two fifteen-year-old girls from the city’s 16th arrondissement as they move through leisure, conversation, and social encounters. The film records their views on adulthood, relationships, and the future, capturing a moment of transition between adolescence and adult life.

Collaborative experimental project on which three director made different films about the Swedish icebreaker "Frej".

Six vignettes set in different sections of Paris, by six directors. St. Germain des Pres (Douchet), Gare du Nord (Rouch), Rue St. Denis (Pollet), and Montparnasse et Levallois (Godard) are stories of love, flirtation and prostitution; Place d'Etoile (Rohmer) concerns a haberdasher and his umbrella; and La Muette (Chabrol), a bourgeois family and earplugs.

The film narrates a utopian abandonment, consensual and festive of the market economy and high productivity. The population decides on a number of resolutions beginning with "We stop everything" and the second "After a total downtime will be revived-reluctantly-that the services and products including lack will prove intolerable. Probably: water to drink, electricity for reading at night, the TSF to say "This is not the end of the world, this is an 01, and now a page of Celestial Mechanics". The implementation of these resolutions is the first day of a new era, Year 01. The Year 01 is emblematic of the challenge of the 1970s and covers such diverse topics as ecology, negation of authority, free love, communal living, rejection of private property and labor.

Jean Rouch gives a group of black and white teenagers a "what if" question: what if they socialised with each other? The teenagers then improvise their own characters and situations.

In a busy, noisy neighborhood, a frustrated young wife in a failing marriage is offered her freedom by her indifferent husband, but has second thoughts after meeting an intriguing stranger.

Once upon a time, in the middle of the last century, a great warrior named Babatou. Nigerian jumper from the region Dounga Gurunsi invaded the country and settled there. The brave prisoners were integrated into the army, women espoused. For fifty years, the adventurous young people from Niger Babatou went to live in the epic.