From The US National Archives Youtube Channel. Presented for historical reference. Please feel free to share your comments below.

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Beautifully photographed film directed by UCLA film professor Mark McCarty that follows three Ethiopian Students upon entering a strange country and the perplexing world of University Life at the University of California at Los Angeles. Unique in the sense that the screenplay seems to have been based on the words of the students and they serve as the narrators and performers in the film. While not a documentary in the verité sense, there is an attempt to depict the realities and frustrations of being a "fish out of water" albeit in a very cursory way. A prime example of self-ethnographic film.

Ironically, this little-seen film was released the same year as Ousmane Sembene's BLACK GIRL and uses a similar narrative approach.

Interestingly, the following year, McCarty would collaborate with anthropologist Paul Hockings on production of THE VILLAGE (1968), a 70 minute documentary capturing the lives of the residents of Dunquin, a small town in Western Ireland. Again, the objective was to capture the lives of the people in their own words without narration.

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