Ariella J. Ben-Dov, Artistic and Festival Director of the "Mead," says, "Travel the world all from the comfort of the American Museum of Natural History, where you can get to know the people and places from Mauritania to Mumbai, from Chongqing, China, to St. Petersburg, Russia, and from the Gulf Coast of southern Florida to right next door in Brooklyn. We'll follow the length of a race-track that starts in Paris and ends in Dakar Africa, pausing to meet with the communities along the way. We'll go north to the Seward Peninsula where a Native Alaskan community comes together to mourn the impending loss of their land to climate change. A schoolyard in Brooklyn becomes a battlefield in the War on Terror. And two historic neighborhoods facing the ugly side of urban renewal, one in Beijing, the other St. Petersburg."
The opening night film, "Cooking History", takes us across the battlefields of the 20th century, where even the destructive force of war has contributed to culinary and cultural exchange. In "Hair India", which closes the festival, sacrificial hair shorn in a Hindu temple is transported to a factory in Bangalore, to a distributor in Rome, then back to India’s finest salons. In "Babaji, an Indian Love Story", a Hindi man embraces the burial practices of another religion in hopes of being reunited with his beloved wife. Finally, "Hotel Sahara", about Africans looking for a way into Europe, and "7915 KM", about Europeans racing through northeastern Africa to Dakar, demonstrate how, for better and worse, we continue to carve new grooves into the world.
The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival honors the legacy of famed anthropologist and American Museum of Natural History curator Margaret Mead, showing documentaries that increase our understanding of the complexity and diversity of the peoples and cultures that populate our planet.
