Nomadenland

In recent years, the number of people living in a bus or camper has increased significantly. But for this growing group, there are fewer and fewer places where you can legally park. The Kardinge car park in Groningen, a popular refuge for people staying in their campers, is also under pressure. Does the Netherlands actually have room for nomads and what drives people to want to live off the beaten track? Filmmaker Tom Tieman temporarily goes into hiding at the Kardinge car park and meets the current residents. Read more

A Gesar Bard's Tale

As a boy, Dawa was an illiterate Tibetan nomad whose life revolved around herding yaks. At 13, his life changed: through a series of visions, Dawa acquired the gift of telling the epic story of Tibet’s King Gesar. Now, at 35, Dawa receives a salary from the government as a guardian of national cultural heritage and is regarded as a holy man by his community. When an earthquake reduces his hometown to rubble, redevelopment of the region takes a giant leap forward. In the midst of such seismic shifts, Dawa seeks healing from King Gesar and other divine protectors of the land.

Piripkura

The last two surviving members of the Piripkura people, a nomadic tribe in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, struggle to maintain their indigenous way of life amidst the region's massive deforestation. Living deep in the rainforest, Pakyî and Tamandua live off the land relying on a machete, an ax, and a torch lit in 1998.

Tawai: A Voice from the Forest

Explorer Bruce Parry visits nomadic tribes in Borneo and the Amazon in hope to better understand humanity's changing relationship with the world around us.

The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker

This shocking documentary chronicles a happy-go-lucky nomad's ascent to viral stardom and the steep downward spiral that resulted in his imprisonment.

The White Caravan

The neon sign ‘Circus’ illuminates the wide street of Naples’ suburbs: four circus families were abandoned by the institutions, and now they’re awaiting the pandemic will disappear, like a magic show. The circus has stopped, but their lives go on.

The Saltmen of Tibet

Four men from a nomadic Tibetan tribe undertake their annual, ritualistic pilgrimage to a sacred salt lake. Salt gathered in this traditional fashion will be sold to provide the economic livelihood of the tribe for the coming year. The journey, necessary for the group's survival, also incorporates a number of rituals necessary for their culture to survive in the modern world.

The White Reindeer

Imagine one of the most remote wildernesses in the world. Granddaughter Masha and Vladimir, the protagonists of this story from Central Siberia try the impossible to keep their nomadic traditions alive.

Wings of Kyrgyzstan

As „wings of men“ they became the faithful companion of a great nomadic nation thousands of years ago. Today, 28 years after the Soviet occupation, the little horse is an essential part of the cultural heritage and the search for identity of the modern Kyrgyz people. Based on its own story, a so called „good brown horse“ leads through the film and offers an insight of what it could mean to be „todays wings of men“. Told by a horse’s voice and through its eyes, this short film still is a documentary, but also a poetic journey to a nomadic culture.

Arkadia

In a world where farming is mechanized and farm animals are fed with products coming from across the globe, a young shepherd is trying to keep his practice sustainable by using ancestral ways to raise his flock.

Last Nomads in Anatolia: Sarikecilis

Sarikecilis are the last representatives in Anatolia of the centuries-old tradition of nomadism. Making their way to sea level in winter, and to the highlands in summer, they spend seven months of the year in transit, living off of the goats they keep. This documentary film is telling the story of the last Nomadic tribe in Anatolia within their natural habitat.

The Meaning of Vanlife

The Meaning of Vanlife is an adventurous, revealing look into the Vanlife community through the eyes of nomads who have chosen to live a life of freedom on the road. A movement that exemplifies a deeper societal trend towards minimalism and authentic community building.

School of Hope

In the vast expanse of desert East of Atlas Mountains in Morocco, seasonal rain and snow once supported livestock, but now the drought seems to never end. Hardly a blade of grass can be seen, and families travel miles on foot to get water from a muddy hole in the ground. Yet the children willingly ride donkeys and bicycles or walk for miles across rocks to a "school of hope" built of clay. Following both the students and the teachers in the Oulad Boukais Tribe's community school for over three years, SCHOOL OF HOPE shows students Mohamed, Miloud, Fatima, and their classmates, responding with childish glee to the school's altruistic young teacher, Mohamed. Each child faces individual obstacles - supporting their aging parents; avoiding restrictions from relatives based on traditional gender roles - while their young teacher makes do in a house with no electricity or water.

Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan

In the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan, tradition is king. Polo's still played with a freshly killed goat and the men still marry their women the old-fashioned way: by abducting them off the street and forcing them to be their wife. Bride kidnapping is a supposedly ancient custom that's made a major comeback since the fall of Communism and now accounts for nearly half of all marriages in some parts.

L'école du voyage

Roamers - Follow Your Likes

ROAMERS accompanies different characters on their way through the countries and social media feeds of this world: From the celebrated video blogger from Palestine who quit his lucrative job at PayPal in favor of as much life experience as possible, to the former young top manager who gave up her business in Switzerland and her marriage for the adventure of a round-the-world trip, to the Argentinean couple who use their computer science skills acquired at IBM to distribute self-produced porn videos online "on demand" and thus finance their trip around the world. As digital nomads who become the creators of their impressive life stories on their own initiative, they are all sounding out the boundaries of a new era: between personal freedom and the dependence on algorithms and wifi, between self-fulfillment and self- exploitation - in search of meaning and support in a world that offers ever more possibilities and yet also seems increasingly fragmented.

Amin

AMIN portrays Qashqai musician Amin Aghaie, a young modern nomad and his family who despite facing steep financial, cultural and political obstacles are dedicated to their art and culture. Amin travels to remote towns and villages to record the music of the surviving masters whose numbers decline each year. His nomadic family are selling their meager belongings to help support their son's education in performance and ethnomusicology at Tchaikovsky's Conservatory in Kyiv, Ukraine, but it is not enough. Amin, desperate to finish his academic education, sells his violins one at a time just to pay for his tuition.

The Last of the Nomads

Like an antipodean version of Romeo and Juliet, it emerges that Warri and Yatungka became the last nomads because they had married outside their tribal laws and eloped to the most inaccessible of regions. In 1977 the land was stricken by a severe drought and their tribal elders mounted a search for them with the help of a party of white men led by Dr Bill Peasley and one of their own number, a childhood friend named Mudjon. The film takes Dr Peasley back into the desert to relive his momentous journey with Mudjon and culminates with poignant archival footage of the elderly couple found naked and starving.

Nomad's Land: In the Footsteps of Nicolas Bouvier

The young director, Gael Metroz, takes the road alone, camera in hand, in the footsteps of Nicolas Bouvier. He discovers that the East is no longer the almost carefree land of the Fifties recounted in l'Usage du Monde: Iran in crises, Pakistan shaken by tribal violence's, Taliban, civil war in Sri Lanka. This world, Bouvier had the usage, seem to have disappeared under the veil of time. Disappointed the director leaves the main road traced by the famous Topolino and continues on the small path with the nomads. In creating his own route, Gael Metroz reveals the writer's philosophy of travel.

Kirgistan - Hochgebirgsland voller Schätze