BAY OF ALL SAINTS examines the water slums of Bahia, Brazil, known as the palafitas
American Museum of Natural History
Central Park West at 79th St.
November 29 – December 2, $12-$45
212-769-5200
www.amnh.org
The thirty-sixth annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, held at the American Museum of Natural History in honor of the revolutionary work done by the master cultural anthropologist, focuses this year on the narrative itself. “The stories build bridges, dissolve ownership,” North American ethnology curator Peter M. Whiteley explains in the festival brochure. “Whose story is it? It is mine, yours, now via film, all the world’s. The local is made global, the unfamiliar familiar, and the universe of human understanding is expanded.” From November 29 through December 2, viewers will be taken to contemporary Pakistan in Saida Shepard and Samina Quraeshi’s The Other Half of Tomorrow, India and Burma in Patrick Morell’s Nagaland: The Last of the Headhunters, the slums of Bahia, Brazil, in Annie Eastman, Diane Markrow, and Davis Coombe’s Bay of All Saints, a “shack side” district of South Africa in Benjamin Kahlmeyer’s Meanwhile in Mamelodi, and Tajikistan for a look at an unusual sport in Najeeb Mirza’s Buzkashi! Two food-themed films, Valérie Berteau and Philippe Witjes’s Himself He Cooks, which goes inside the Sikh tradition of langar in the Golden Temple of Amritsar, and Rob and Lisa Fruchtman’s Sweet Dreams, about a group of Rwandan women opening the country’s first ice-cream shop, are being presented in conjunction with the museum’s new exhibit, “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.” There will also be a tribute to legendary filmmaker George Stoney, featuring screenings of Man of Aran and How the Myth Was Made, a Bhangra Dance Party with DJ Rekha, an African drumming performance in the Hall of Birds of the World, a Mead Arcade with online games, and several Mead Dialogues, including “Re-Seeing the Century: The Expedition on Film,” “Through Navajo Eyes,” and “Sun Kissed.” The Mead is one of the city’s most important film festivals, offering penetrating, educational, joyful, and frightening looks at a world outside our own — and sometimes a lot closer to home that we could ever imagine.