Mondo Cane

Mondo Cane (1962) is the Italian shockumentary you can watch online on iFILM — the film that handed the whole "mondo" genre its name. Directors Gualtiero Jacopetti, Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi roamed the globe collecting strange, brutal and absurd human customs, then cut them together by jarring contrast.

A funeral rite beside a beauty parlor, an insect banquet, a South Pacific cargo cult waiting on planes that never land — the film hops continents, jamming the "savage" up against the "civilized" until you can't tell which is which. Its famous narration swears every scene is real, and if it shocks you, that is because the world is full of shocking things.

Time has complicated its reputation: some sequences are staged or stripped of context, and the filmmakers' gaze is smugly Eurocentric. Even so, the influence runs deep — it spawned the entire shockumentary lineage, and its theme song "More" went all the way to an Oscar nomination. Watch it as a 1962 time capsule, not as honest ethnography. Stream Mondo Cane (1962) online on iFILM.