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Located in the wilderness area of Campo, in Cameroon, and facing the company Socapalm which exploits oil palm trees, the village of Mabenanga lives on the freshwater shrimps fishing which is the pride of the restaurants of Kribi, Douala or Yaoundé.

Boys, from two to nine year old, manage all alone their own cult to Nya, among the Minyanka people from Mali. The oldest is the chief of the cult. Children are very autonomous but they do not innovate and faithfully reproduce the ritual adults behavior, who never intervene during the cult.

In Eastern Greenland, a few families of hunters still maintain the nomadic way of life of their ancestors. Through recent images, historical documents and computer graphics, this film illustrates the considerable evolution of the East-Greenlandic population over a few decades. This includes the adoption by these ancient nomads of a new sedentary life-style.

At Joal in Senegal, a mother washes her new born baby, Maghet Sène.

Thousands of Ethiopian Jews (Falachas) are leaving their home villages and move to the country's capital, Addis Abeba, then trying to emigrate to Israel. Some of them are interviewed and tell about their hopes and problems, facing all the difficulties.

Nioro du Sahel in Mali has been twined with the town of Limours in France since 1983. In 1983, the twinning committee, with the help of the French Ministry for Cooperation and the Malian government, decided to equip the town with electricity. This report shows the electrification works and also many interviews of Nioro inhabitants, all having a passion with this revolution.

Banda Gbambiya musicians, who live in the North-West of Central African Republic, have a collective musical practice using multiple portative resonators xylophones. The village has its own orchestra composed of four xylophones, which are played during ritual ceremonies or entertainments.

In the Akungu camp, located in the Central African Republic, two special events are shot: in 1992, the mime of the delivery by a young pygmy woman and in 1995, the newborn Masiki's nursing.

In Diraralei, a little village on the Botel-Tobago Island (located next to Taiwan), Yami people are divided into two places, in accordance with their age. The elders live in the primeval village, while the young people often occupy temporarily the village on the top. According to the place of residence, the cares given to the children are different.

In the Akungu camp, located in Central African Republic, the community is stunned by the recent death of two young girls, provoked by the consumption of a toxic yam. The days are marked by different events, concerning in particular the familial therapy.

This film shows the living conditions of African immigrates, who live in unfit buildings in Paris. It deals with the serious health problems (saturnism) provoked on the children by the ingestion of lead nitrate contained in the wall paints of the staircase and the apartments.

On the Botel Tobago Island in Taiwan, the first months of the lunar Yami calendar (July-August) are dedicated to buildings and collective festivities of competitive nature. They are punctuated with responsorial songs which can be sung in the Karyag way, that is to say “accompanied by banging hands”.

Among the Ekonda of Zaire, the most important moment in a woman's life is undoubtedly the birth of her first child. The young nursing mother, called Walé, returns to her parents where she is confined for 2 to 5 years. Chantal, a young woman living in the village of Ikongo will be coming out of reclusion. She prepares a performance of dances and songs.

In June 1994, inhabitants of the pygmy camp of Akungu, in Central African Republic, suffer from misfortunes. Diverse rituals are practiced in order to bring back well-being and concord.

In the Northern and Eastern regions of Chad, in Zarawa, Bideyat and Goranes breeders groups, blacksmiths are considered as a lower caste. They practice their art and also other artisanal techniques (wood and leather work), even music.

At the end of the 19th century, E.J. Marey and E. Muybridge separately invented instruments which permit to study the musculoskeletal movements of the big mammals, in particular the horse. Observing the musculoskeletal of small mammals is complicated, because their movements are fastest and their fur hides their limbs. The tachycineradiography, a technique which associates high-speed cinematography to radiography, permits to discover the whole geometry of their skeleton, and to analyze their…

In 1963, a scientific base was built in the Kings Bay of Spitsbergen. It ' s the only French base of the whole Arctic. This film recounts the activities of the French scientists on this base through current and stock documents.

2 - Technical developments around the turn of the century. The image-recording devices and early filming techniques used by the successors of Muybridge and Marey, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 3 - Early applications. Presentation, by scientific discipline, of films shot between 1895 and 1911, which required various especially adapted or recently invented filming techniques.

A young Dogon woman has just given birth to a little girl. Important rituals are required for the child's admission into society.

A re-enactment of a tale of the Dogon people of Sanga, Mali, showing how the Dogons conceive criminality, justice and the death penalty.

A mother in the Fulah village of Ibel, eastern Senegal, washes her nine-month-old baby girl.

The Yahgan Indians, now extinct, were a nomadic hunter-gatherer people. This film tells their story and describes their lifestyle and culture, in the setting of their former homelands of Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego.

In Sardinia, music, songs and dances are part and parcel of daily life. These different musical and vocal traditions are more particularly expressed during traditional and religious celebrations.

In Cambay, a town in Gujarat, India, agate- and carnelian-cutting is performed in many workshops according to traditional techniques, some of which go back 4,000 years.

Ecological film-maker Alain R. Devez and Jean-Pierre Gasc, researcher at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, explain the principle of "tachycineradiography" at 500 frames a second, which enables observation of the skeletons of small vertebrates in movement, slowed down to 1/20th normal speed.

Shri T. Khrishnamacharya, man of science, philosopher, poet, musician, therapist and yogi, celebrated his hundredth birthday in November 1988, in Madras. A great three-day festival is being planned: one hundred and eight Brahman priests were invited to celebrate the occasion with sacrifices. The birthday celebrations (reciting of prayers, fumigations, incantations, and miscellaneous offerings) are presented in alternance with the practice and teaching of yoga by the grand master Shri T…

In the practice of overtone singing, which is best known in Mongolia and Southern Siberia, a single person sings two voices at the same time : a low-pitched sound with his vocal cords and in addition a melody using selected harmonics in the buccal cavity. An introductory course conducted by Tran Quang Hai, a concert and the interviews of Mongolian singers, X-ray and spectrographical pictures, in real time and synchronous sound, show how this unique vocal technique operates.

Ethnologist and film-maker Patrice Fava has sought out surviving traditions - mainly of Taoist origin - in China.

Awa, a seven-month old baby girl is bathed by her mother.

An ordinary morning for Awa, a seven-month-old baby girl in Pikine, Senegal.

A morning in the household of a maker of prayer beads in Malicka, a suburb of Dakar-Pikine, Senegal.

The inhabitants of Nordeste region in Brazil live in precarious conditions of health and hygiene. The first unmistakable signs of collective conscience appear in a number of episodes in their daily lives.

The learning process of psychomotor functions by Yacine, a small deaf-and-dumb girl who lives in Dakar-Pikine, Senegal, and her social integration.

At Sao Paulo, in Brazil, an employers' organization, the SESC, confided the architect Lina Do bardi with the task of restoring an unused fac tory, the Fabrica da Pompeia, and setting it up as a culture nd leisure center. What was designed as a center for a small area is now frequented by the entire population of Sao Paulo.

A farmer in Steenwerck, a village of northern France, decides to build a weathercock on his roof and gradually shapes it into an airplane.

The villagers of Salmé, in Nepal, farm a mountainside where different cereals are grown at different altitudes.

On Saint-Nazaire's day, the "donkey's tour" is held : the last man to have married in the year rides a donkey through the city of Carcassonne.

Filmed in Alsace in 1967, an ironsmith readjusts the iron rim of a wheel.

During the shooting of Jean Rouch's "Dyonisos", G. Dieterlen, E. Fulchignoni and other participating friends recall their meeting and their research with the filmmaker.

Evocation of the multiple research activities of the CNRS as of its creation, with the participation of numerous personalities : the various esearch laboratories and units, and collaboration with international partners.

Extracts from the earliest scientific films, made between 1872 and 1911 and demonstrating different cinematographic inventions.

Preparation and celebation of the traditional palm fruit festival in a Columbian Amazonian village of Bora Indians. During the preparations, a religious service is carried out without the priest ; during the festival itself, in the presence of the priest and nuns, mythic Bora sayings and Biblical texts become mixed in the course of the tradional songs and dances, mask games, and various sports contests.

In Mawri country in the Niger Republic, Ahmadu Gaoh is enthroned as the new ruler. The event provides an opportunity to see the changes that have taken place in Mawri society.

Maurice Godelier, the first ethnologist to have met the Baruya people of Papua New Guinea, describes his working methods and personal relationships with the Baruya.

In Bissau, the inhabitants of each district of the town prepare their masks, songs and dances for the carnival parade in the greatest secrecy.

Appearance is of great importance to the Bororo, to the Wadaabe in particular. After the rainy season, the Wadaabe hold a gerewole at the home of a rich herdsman. This is a contest of beauty, dancing and elegance for the young men, who dance for four days and nights on end.

Interview of Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist and professor at College de France about his works and his approach of modern anthropology.

After the tides of Buddhism in the Northwest part of the Indian subcontinent and the heart of Aghanistan, a Muslim society has solidly anchored itself from the Hindu Kush to the Indus.

In 1974 in the Hérault, a new crisis in the wine industry prompted a reassessment of traditional wine production. A purely family-based vineyard could no longer cope with the economic difficulties of agricultural production, and wine-growers turned to other solutions to enable them to go on making a living. Two wine-growers decided to join together to form one company: the conservative spirit of previous generations is recalled by these two growers, who also discuss the traditional values of a…

Daily life in a village of North East France at the time of the local elections in March 1971: the clash of interest causes tension among the villagers throughout the period.