The thirty-fifth annual Margaret Mead Film Festival is sure to take viewers to places they’ve never been
American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at 79th St.
November 10-13, $12-$40
212-769-5200
www.amnh.org/mead
“The first Margaret Mead Film Festival, held on Mead’s own seventy-fifth birthday and her fiftieth year at the [American Museum of Natural History], was meant to be a one-time celebration, but it became one of the most enduring legacies in support of visual anthropologists, inspiring generations of anthropologists and filmmakers, including myself,” writes Faye Ginsburg in the brochure for the thirty-fifth annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, running November 10-13 at AMNH. Ginsburg, an anthropology professor and director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History at NYU, will be moderating the panel discussion “How Do We Look?” on November 13 at 4:30, examining the history of the first documentary festival of its kind. Lotte Stoops’s Grande Hotel is the opening-night selection, while Meshakai Wolf’s Flames of God, introduced by Darren Aronofsky, closes things out on Sunday night. In between are such new documentaries as Robert Nugent’s Memoirs of a Plague and Alain LeTourneau and Pam Minty’s Empty Quarter along with retrospective screenings of Jean Rouch’s Jaguar from 1967, John Marshall and Adrienne Miesmer’s N!ai, The Story of a !Kung Woman from 1980, and Gregory Bateson and Mead’s Trance and Dance in Bali from 1952. Many of the screenings will include appearances by the filmmakers and subjects in addition to related live performances, most notably following Katja Esson’s Skydancer on Sunday afternoon. With the continual technological leaps being made these days, the world might appear to be getting smaller and smaller, but it still takes a festival such as the Mead to help open one’s eyes to what is really going on out there.