Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival 2000"The movies are particularly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and the world, and the expression of one in the other."-Maurice Merleau-PontyEthnographic cinema has evolved from its anthropological roots to become documentary's avant-garde-films that by virtue of their focus on cross-cultural difference explore "the subjective and the objective, the self and the other," as Lucien Taylor and Elisa Barbash have written. A dazzling array of films from around the world-artistic and compelling, often quirky, always eye-opening, sometimes painfully so-is on view this month, presented by the nation's premier showcase for ethnographic cinema, The Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival of the Museum of Natural History in New York. Between November 3 and December 1 we will see elders taking charge in post-Mao Tibet, female wrestlers in Japan, reservation humor in America, Russian Eskimos' political tales, an Iranian woman shedding the veil, some hard truths about fiber-optics, and a covert and very personal look at the underreported genocide in Sudan. This year's festival offers a special series on documentary animations, plus recent works by Errol Morris, David MacDougall, Mira Nair, Eduardo Coutinho, Sharon Lockhart, and Péter Forgács, among many other talented filmmakers. We invite you to take advantage of this unique opportunity to put the world in mind.This series is presented under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, New York, and in association with the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. PFA thanks Margaret Mead Festival Director Elaine Charnov.The series is presented in conjunction with the course Ethnographic Film, taught by Thor Anderson, an ethnographic filmmaker. Special thanks to Professor Anderson, who contributed many of our program notes. Films and tapes are in the language of their origin with English subtitles and are in color except as noted. Friday November 3
