Personal stories behind the doctors' crisis in rural Australia. Dr Mary Fortune leaves her home, family and friends in Scotland to answer the cries for help from the mining town of Kalgoorlie, in WA. Despite knowing she will miss her son, and husband of 22 years, Dr Mary is excited about the challenge of moving to Kalgoorlie and optimistic about what the experience will be like.--Kanopy.

Photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon is renowned for his documentation of the French countryside. In Modern Life he casts an affectionate and irreverent eye on a small community of farmers as they are confronted by the problems and challenges the contemporary world brings. Treated with equal suspicion, strangers and women are gradually accepted into the fabric of the farming life so as to sustain a way of life that celebrates the traditions...

Carnival time is big in this small Spanish town in Andalusia. Appropriately described by a local as a 'newspaper', the carnival is a time of dressing up and coming together. The men compose 'spicy' songs about local affairs and sing their social criticisms of national events.

More than half way through Dr Mary's secondment, an Australian General Election is called. Dr Mary hopes this could lead to a new dawn in indigenous health funding but the signs aren't good. As her time in Kununurra continues, Dr Mary becomes aware of the role alcohol plays in her patient's lives. In the Kimberley, people drink two and a half times the state average and there is four and a half times the number of alcohol related deaths. With this...

An Aymara family plants potatoes, prepares and eats a meal, and discusses the religious and astronomical forces that control their destiny. The stark routine of this typical planting day contrasts with thecomplexity of their beliefs.

An old Bolivian man nears the end of his life. He has property and status, but not contentment. Believing himself posessed by evil spirits, he opens his heart to reveal his anguish. His personal tragedy brings us close to every man's confrontation with the unknown, old age, and death.

Kalliopi Kalogerou has spent her whole life in the Greek village of Ano Ravenia where she was born in 1900. Simple witness of the century, she lived through Turkish domination and successive occupations linked to different wars. This film is exclusively devoted to her life story.

A story about a village teacher who introduces education for local self-development explores the relationships between progressive activists, entrenched social interests, traditional belief system and rural Africans. Sango Malo offers American viewers an intimate and engaging portrait of the complex social dynamic underlying economic and political change in a typical African village. It argues passionately that a populist education must be a key component...

Yanomamo feasts are ceremonial, social, economic, and political events. They are occasions for men to adorn their bodies with paint and feathers, to display their strength in dance and ritualized aggression; for trading partnerships to be established or affirmed; and for the creation or testing of alliances.

Dedeheiwa the shaman weeds his manioc garden and clears the leaves around his plantains. Tired and sore, he rests while he is massaged and groomed by his wife and numerous children, with whom he plays affectionately.