A dazzling array of ethnographic films from around the world-artistic and compelling, often quirky, always eye–opening, sometimes painfully so-is on view in November. Ethnographic cinema has drawn on its anthropological roots to become documentary's cutting edge-films that by virtue of their focus on cross-cultural difference explore "the self and the other." For lovers of film, culture, and the unexpected, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is an annual autumn ritual in New York City, and its tour to PFA each November has become a tradition in its own right.
This year's festival at PFA offers slices of European colonial history you won't find in textbooks, and a postcolonial present that is underreported in the Western media-including why Afghanistan is defined as "the land of cries and screams." From veteran filmmakers we get an update on two tribes-the Hamar of Southern Ethiopia, who thrive on personal interaction; and the Ju/'hoansi of Namibia, who fail to thrive, isolated by the bushman myth. We find global capitalism in unlikely places, from Butte, Montana, to Burkina Faso; and Sudan's "Lost Boys" displaced in Texas. A new work from acclaimed Chinese director Ning Ying offers intimate glimpses of Chinese life, while in Eastern Europe filmmakers explore memory and reconstruction in the emotional and physical landscape, and find guardian angels and the devil alive and well.
