The Morning Ritual / 2008

"The Morning Ritual" mixes fiction with the reality of India's largest metropolis - Mumbai. Iqbal Sheikh, 7 plays himself - Iqbal. A new law will not allow Iqbal to perform his morning ritual where he usually does because of the plush condos that have been erected by the sea. His quest to do his morning ritual takes him to the city's new public toilets, to a brush with the dangerous toilet mafia and to a place he has never been before - the other Mumbai.

Ritualis / 2004

Experimental short film made for the metal band Rostrum.

Ritual Visceral Memory / 2020

Ritual Visceral Memory/ Acts of Reclamation for the forgotten body. An installation of tenderness. A black body touched with care is revolution. Reclaiming our birthright cell by cell. This video work is a living poem co written by Nikesha Breeze and FAM. The performance explores the role of tenderness and touch on the Black and Indigenous body. The way we take care of the land and our home is the way we should care for each other. Nikesha Breeze directs and performs in this work, unbinding and washing two BIPOC women as a symbolic gesture of remembering and drawing the invisibilized and dismembered black body.

Passage Through: A Ritual / 1990

“[Passage Through] required the most exacting editing process ever; and in the course of that work it occurred to me that I’d originally made 'The Riddle of Lumen' hoping someone would make an ‘answering’ film and entertain my visual riddle in the manner of the riddling poets of yore. I most expected Hollis Frampton (because of 'Zorns Lemma') to pick up the challenge; but he never did. In some sense I think composer Corner has – and now we have this dance of riddles as music and film combine to make ‘passage,’ in every sense of the word, further possible.” –S.B.

Sky Burial: A Tibetan Death Ritual / 2005

Sky Burial follows the ritual of "jha-tor", the giving of alms to birds in a northern Tibetan monastery - where the bodies of the dead are offered to the vultures as a final act of kindness to living beings. At the Drigung Monastery lamas chant to call the consciousness from the body. Juniper incense is burned to summon the vultures. Special body breakers, or "rogyapas", unwrap the bodies and cut away the flesh. The bones are crushed and mixed with tsampa, roasted barley flour. The entire body is consumed by the birds, assuring the ascent of the soul. The sky, or the universe, is where the sacred world lies. To merge with the sky after death is a holy event, one that replaces the sufferings of this world with peace.

The Sculptor's Ritual / 2009

A desperate art student joins with secret occultists to find success. But when he has everything he ever wanted, he is haunted by the demons he invited into his life. Craving normality, he fights to keep his dark past from the woman he loves

Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space / 1981

Shopping Bag, Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space explores nine Los Angeles based artists reflecting on ritual in their life and art. Artist David Hammons discusses the role of chance and improvisation in his work while working on sculpture on a waste site while N’Senga Nengudi talks about staging her performances in freeway underpasses. Spanning performance to spoken word, environmental sculpture to music each artist talks about how ritual and cultural traditions informs their work. This experimental essay intercuts interviews, documentation and photographs with the music of Don Cherry seeking to adjust the criteria and language used to talk about artists of colour.

The Ritual /

This is the story of a young man as he desperately tries to bring a loved one back from the dead; but conjures something else entirely...

A Morning Ritual / 2019

A desperate man renews himself with a strange ritual.

Louie Vega - Dance Ritual NY / 2005

Master at Work "Lil" Louie Vega presents a look at what Dance Ritual means.

Rituals of Resistance / 2019

A Tibetan-American filmmaker explores modes of resistance to Chinese occupation by speaking with activists across generations. A former Tibetan monk broke his vows and became a guerilla leader. The filmmaker's own mother followed the Dalai Lama's Middle Path and raised her family in America. A young Tibetan man attempted to self-immolate in 2006. How does the filmmaker understand his place in the struggle?

Ritual 629 / 1999

Film by Luther Price from 1990-1999

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification / 1979

Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Water Ritual #1 examines Black women’s ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, the film was made in an area of Watts that had been cleared to make way for the I-105 freeway, but ultimately abandoned. Though the film is set in contemporary L.A., at first sight, Milanda and her environs (burnt-out houses overgrown with weeds) might seem to be located in Africa or the Caribbean, or at some time in the past. Structured as an Africanist ritual for Barbara McCullough’s “participant-viewers,” the film addresses how conditions of poverty, exploitation and anger render the Los Angeles landscape not as the fabled promised land for Black migrants, but as both cause and emblem of Black desolation. (Jacqueline Stewart)

The Ritual / 2000

Nessa, an archeologist at odds with the establishment and haunted by violent dreams of Celtic sacrifices tries to find an ancient relic supposedly from the De Danann period (pre 500 B.C.) called the "Danu Amulet."

Ritual and Repetition /

Ritual and Repetition was shot in Xiamen at the Nanputuo Temple. The experimental short film examines the ritualistic space of the temple as a site that engages a range of histories and religions (Buddhism and Confucianism), which day after day interacts with crowds of people coming to pray, practice, sightsee, and explore the space.

El ritual del alcaucil / 2020

Circle of Abstract Ritual / 2014

Circle of Abstract Ritual began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing.

Ritual for Third World Women Artists / 1978

Ritual for Third World Women Artists

Dive - Rituals in Water / 2019

For 28 years, Icelandic babies and their new parents have bonded in a unique way at a shabby pool not far from the ocean and the mountains. Six days a week, Snorri, a pioneer and visionary swimming coach, creates a unique world where babies stand on his palm and swim underwater by opening lines of nonverbal communication and earning their — and their parents’ — trust.

Rituals We Wish We Had / 2020

In a multi screen collage of visual experiments a longing for tribal habits is explored. Rituals We Wish We Had is a film about being homesick for a place you have never been.