Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival Lenses World Communities

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 25 October 2010 01:07

Written by Laura Blum

Anthropologist Margaret Mead is rumored to have said, “Always remember that you are absolutely unique…just like everyone else,” and judging by the distinctive stories on offer at the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival (November 11 to 14, 2010), the programmers indeed remembered.

Not that you won’t find shared themes amidst all that diversity.

Marking its 34th year, the Mead will once again spotlight global documentaries under the auspices of Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History. According to Artistic and Festival Director Ariella Ben-Dov, many of this year’s selections show communities coalescing around a critical challenge, even one that threatens their way of life.

The Opening night film is Plug & Pray/Von Computern und anderen Menschen, directed by Judith Malek-Mahdavi and Jens Schanze. The film advances Joseph Weizenbaum, a pioneer of artificial intelligence who questions the scientific assumptions that technology can trump biology.

Closing the Festival is Nicola Bellucci’s In the Garden of Sounds/Nel giardino dei suoni. It features Wolfgang Fasser, a former physical therapist who turned to the therapeutic powers of sound after he lost his eyesight. Together with The Electric Mind -- Nadav Harel’s look at the bleeding-edge neurological tinkerings experienced by four patients – these films expand on the Museum’s exhibition Brain: The Inside Story, which opens November 20.

The work of scholar, photographer, musician and filmmaker John Cohen will come under the limelight in a seven-film tribute. “John Cohen: A Life in Work” will include such titles as Peruvian Weaving: A Continuous Warp, Pericles in America and the world premiere of Roscoe Holcomb from Daisy, Kentucky.

For the first time, the Mead will pinion The Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award on a filmmaker whose nonfiction feature gives a fresh take on a culture or community off the audience’s trodden path. In addition to the filmmakers of the abovementioned The Electric Mind and In the Garden of Sounds, the award contenders are:

• Eva Eckert for A Mountain Musical
• Stefan Constantinescu and Julio Soto for My Beautiful Dacia
• Boris Bertram for Tankograd
• Marc Francis and Nick Francis for When China Met Africa
• Alexander Kelider and Daniela Michel for When the Mountain meets its Shadow

Alongside film screenings will be a special event showcasing some of the Museum's 40,000 glass lantern slides, used as educational media as far back as the late 1800s. Resident archivist Barbara Mathé will discuss these archival artifacts, which once anchored a celebrated lecture series by zoologist and AMNH founder Albert Bickmore. 

Dig out the rest of the Festival offerings at http://amnh.org/mead

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
November 11 to 14, 2010
American Museum of Natural History
77th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10024

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