美國

Join the enthusiastic converts to a new alternative trend that recognizes and embraces the healing powers of laughter. People from all works of life are engaging in spontaneous, uninhibited laughter as a means of reducing stress and warding off depression. While the movement’s founders claim that their practices derive from the venerable art of yoga, India’s laughing club reflect an unmistakably modern need to bound with one’s fellows in an otherwise impersonal society.

In Haiti, many poor families are forced to give away their children. The children then go to live and work for other families as unpaid servants. This film follows the children throughout their day as they do all the housework and also interviews them where they speak freely for the first time on camera. The film also interviews the “aunts” (adoptive caretakers) who speak proudly of all the work that their little slave does for them. The cameras go deep into the countryside to interview the parents who were forced to give away their children and we see he circumstances that led them to do this. Interviews with Haitian priests and social workers round out the picture. Narrated entirely by the people themselves in their native Creole (Eng. subtitles), the film is both emotional and informative.

Presents a series of scenes in which children of the same age in Bali and New Guinea respond to the mother’s attending another baby, the ear piercing of a younger sibling, and the experimental presentation of a doll. The Balinese mother handles sibling rivalry by theatrical teasing of her own child through conspicuous attention to other babies. The Iatmul mother in New Guinea, even when nursing a newborn infant, makes every effort to keep her child from feeling jealous. The film shows the Balinese child’s interest is focused on younger children.

A series of scenes in the life of a Balinese child, It begins with a seventh-month birthday ceremonial, showing Kaba’s relationships to his parents, aunts, and uncles, including the child’s nurse, and other children, as he is suckled, taught to walk and dance, and teased and titillated. The film illustrates that a Balinese child’s responsiveness is muted if the parents stimulate him, but fail to respond.

A performance of the kris dance, a Balinese ceremonial dance drama in which the never-ending struggle between the witch and the dragon – the death-dealing and the life-protecting – as it is given in the village of Pagoetan from 1937-39. The dancers go into violent trance seizures and turn their kris (dagger) against their breats without injury. Consciousness is restored with incense and holy water. Balinese music forms a background for Dr. Margaret Mead’s narration.