Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life

Before King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack made their name with this astonishing ethnographic documentary. They joined the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia on its annual migration — some 50,000 people and half a million animals crossing icy rivers and a 12,000-foot mountain pass in search of pasture. The scale is still hard to believe, and the sequence of the migration over the Karun River on inflated goatskin rafts is one of the great images in documentary history. Released by Paramount in 1925 and never renewed, the film is in the public domain.