Margaret Mead Film Festival Returns After Pandemic Hiatus, Countering Worrisome Trend In Festival Space
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EXCLUSIVE: The Human Rights Watch Film Festival recently announced it’s closing down, and the future of Hot Docs remains uncertain at best. But there’s some hopeful news for the troubled film festival space: the return of the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York.
The longest running nonfiction film festival in the U.S. reemerges May 9, after being dark since the pandemic. The four-day event will showcase documentary films from across the globe, as well as animation, panel discussions, and live performances, all from its home base at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. [Scroll for the full program]
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“Mead 2024 gives platform to new voices that inspire fresh conversations about our shared humanity,” noted Jacqueline Handy, director of public programs at the American Museum of Natural History, adding the festival has been “a vibrant part of the Museum landscape since 1977.”
The festival kicks off on Thursday, May 9 with Soundtrack ‘63, “a live, music and multimedia retrospective of the Black experience in America.” The following evening will see the New York premiere of Sugarcane, the award-winning documentary that investigates the legacy of residential schools in British Columbia where Indigenous children were separated from their families and systematically deprived of their language and culture, coercing them to assimilate into white Canadian society.
Sugarcane directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, who won the U.S. Documentary directing award for their film at Sundance, will participate in a Q&A following the Margaret Mead premiere. (National Geographic, which acquired the film out of Sundance, will open the film in theaters later this year).
On view throughout the festival will be Karam Gill’s docuseries Ice Cold: The Untold Story of Hip Hop Jewelry, a four-part examination of “the cultural significance and craftsmanship behind hip hop jewelry, exploring its evolution from a symbol of status to a form of self-expression.” The series is being presented alongside the opening of a special exhibition at the museum titled Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry.
Mead 2024 features documentaries from Ecuador (Ozogoche), Ukraine (Porcelain War), Italy (Pure Unknown), the Eastern Himalayas (Nocturnes), Bhutan (Agent of Happiness), Democratic Republic of the Congo (Rising Up at Night), and many other parts of the world.
“What you see in the program is very much a Mead program. It’s very international. There are films that are more traditional documentary to more experimental documentary,” festival director Noah Bashevkin told Deadline in an interview. “In general, what connects them is filmmakers who’ve embedded themselves in community and done the work of deep listening with communities around the world. What started as a festival of anthropology [in 1977] has evolved into a festival of documentary because we believe that the two disciplines are not necessarily so different.”
A hiatus of several years provided a chance for the festival to reset, Bashevkin explained. “We did feel like it was an opportunity to sort of refine and double down on some of what makes the festival specific and characterizes the festival.”
To that end, the festival created an advisory board of distinguished figures in documentary and anthropology to consult on the program. The board includes Tabitha Jackson, former director of the Sundance Film Festival, filmmaker Billy Luther, and Harjant Gill, a documentary filmmaker and visual anthropologist.
Jackson said of the program, “These are films that they’re clearly not being made to satisfy a market demand. They’re not being made to satisfy a corporate agenda. They’re not being made as pure entertainment. They are expressions of someone who has to reveal what they have experienced, what they’ve noticed about the world. And they’re kind of thrilling in that way.”
The festival is named for the famed anthropologist and scholar who worked in the American Museum of Natural History’s division of anthropology for more than 50 years. The intersection of documentary filmmaking and anthropology goes back to the very early days of cinema.
“If we think of anthropology as the study of human behavior and what is unique about the species and where we came from and how we behave as this kind of group of monkeys is fascinating. And that is what documentary aspires to reveal as well,” Jackson observed.
She added, “Anthropology went through its own time of examining its practices and who gets to look at whom and who is objectified and where the power dynamics lie. Similar things are going on in the documentary world and, to be fair, have been ever since documentary started. But now there is a particular reckoning with power and gaze and the practices of the documentary field. But the key thing is, as that interrogation and corrective work goes on, it’s still in service of understanding human experience, human history and exactly who we are.”
On Sunday, May 12, the festival will present its Emerging Visual Anthropologist Showcase, exhibiting “exciting new ethnographic documentaries from emerging visual anthropology students.”
“The Emerging Visual Anthropology Showcase has been a part of the Mead for decades if not since the beginning,” Bashevkin commented. “And as the festival thinks about itself more expansively in the field, it’s a way of paying homage and paying due to our origin in academia… If the festival is really intent to bring people together from different communities, one of the main intersections is the film community and the academic community, which often are saying similar things but in different languages and not speaking to each other.”
Along with the Margaret Mead Film Festival, another all-documentary festival, Full Frame in Durham, NC, returned this year after being sidelined by the pandemic. Jackson says the doc field needs these events, especially as a place to exhibit films that fall outside the obvious commercial genres of true crime and celebrity.
“The festival is the kind of important and shiny manifestation of community, of work having been completed, which is always a kind of celebratory act,” Jackson said. “But they are also incredibly important nodes of circulation of the work so that filmmakers and audiences can be inspired by what they’re seeing, how things are being made, as we go forward what new techniques are being used to in some way service truths or reality of human experience.”
This is the lineup of the 2024 Margaret Mead Film Festival:
Thursday, May 9
All Day – ICE COLD: The Untold Story of Hip Hop Jewelry
7 pm – Welcome Performance: Soundtrack ’63
8:30 pm – Welcome Toast
Friday, May 10
All Day – ICE COLD: The Untold Story of Hip Hop Jewelry
7 pm – Opening Night Film: Sugarcane
Saturday, May 11
All Day – ICE COLD: The Untold Story of Hip Hop Jewelry
All Day – Earth in Focus
12 pm – Ozogoche
12 pm – Pure Unknown
1 pm – Revolutionizing Representation: The Significance of Native-Led Stories in Today’s Media Landscape
2 pm – Nocturnes
2:30 pm – ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak)
2:30 pm – Mother Suriname – Mama Sranan
5 pm – The Buriti Flower
5 pm – This Is Going to Be Big
6 pm – Meanwhile
8 pm – Porcelain War
Sunday, May 12
All Day – ICE COLD: The Untold Story of Hip Hop Jewelry
All Day – Earth in Focus
11 am – Emerging Visual Anthropologist Showcase
2:30 pm – Above and Below the Ground
4 pm – 23 Mile
5 pm – Rising Up at Night
7 pm – Agent of Happiness
Highlights include:
Revolutionizing Representation: The Significance of Native-Led Stories in Today’s Media Landscape (Saturday, May 11)
An important discussion on Native-led stories in today’s media landscape with a panel featuring filmmakers Sterlin Harjo and Erica Tremblay of FX’s Reservation Dogs, and Steven Paul Judd of AMC’s Dark Winds, and moderated by acclaimed filmmaker Billy Luther. With the critical and commercial success of series like FX’s Reservation Dogs AMC’s Dark Winds, and Disney+’s Echo, Native-led series with Native-centered stories are hitting a stride in popular culture. What is the significance of this moment in Native storytelling? What kinds of narrative change does the streaming era make possible? What work lies ahead?
Porcelain War [Centerpiece] (Saturday, May 11), directed by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev. The New York Premiere of Grand Jury Prize winner in U.S. Documentary at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Porcelain War follows Slava and Anya, porcelain artists whose ordinary lives are made extraordinary by the terrors of the war in Ukraine. Filmed entirely by Ukrainians resisting Russian occupation, this visually stunning documentary shows how, even in the bleakest moments, the flames of life and art burn bright. There will be a talkback with Jane Ferguson, special correspondent with PBS NewsHour, following the film.
Ozogoche (Saturday, May 11), directed by Joe Houlberg-Silva. U.S. Premiere of Best Documentary winner at the 2024 Oscar-qualifying Cartagena International Film Festival, Ozogoche draws a parallel between human and avian voyages. Against the backdrop of the annual migration of the mysterious “Cuvivi” sandpiper bird to the remote Andean lakes, the film sensitively portrays an Ecuadorian community pulled to migrate north in spite of enormous risk. To be followed by a discussion moderated by journalist Jordan Salama.
ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (We Will Speak) (Saturday, May 11), directed by Schon Duncan and Michael McDermit. With fewer than 1,500 fluent speakers remaining, Cherokee activists rally against time to safeguard their endangered language. Shot over three years following the 2019 declaration of a Cherokee language state of emergency, this gripping film captures the passion of those fighting to preserve the early written language of an Indigenous culture in North America.
23 Mile (Sunday, May 12), directed by Mitch McCabe. Filmmaker Mitch McCabe returns home to Detroit to capture the essence of a nation divided during and after the 2020 presidential election. With captivating scenes and unfiltered voices, the film challenges our preconceptions and urges us to confront our biases. (with Know Your Enemy podcast hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell).
Nocturnes (Saturday, May 11), directed by Anupama Srinivasan and Anirban Dutta
A New York premiere of a documentary from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival is a hypnotic story about moths and reveals concerns around climate change. High in the Eastern Himalayas, a team of biologists observes the mysterious world of moths. Through mesmerizing visuals and soundscapes, Nocturnes unveils the ecological importance and unexpected beauty of these resilient creatures. Nocturnes has received the 2024 World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft.
Agent of Happiness [Closing Night] (Saturday, May 11), directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó . Discover Bhutan, the “happiest country on Earth,” through the eyes of Amber, a bureaucrat who measures the nation’s “Gross National Happiness.” As Amber treks the lush Himalayas, he assigns a happiness score to everyone he meets, from dairy farmers to urban dancers. Does his own search for fulfillment complicate his job? Explore the meaning of belonging and purpose in this touching portrait of a nation constitutionally mandated to promote the happiness of its citizens. Agent of Happiness had its U.S. premiere at Sundance in 2024 and is making its New York premiere at the Mead.
Earth in Focus (Saturday and Sunday, May 11)
Through these six family-friendly shorts, which will play on loop throughout the day, we celebrate the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural world and remember our duty to cherish, protect, and preserve the Earth for generations to come. Featured shorts include Aikāne, directed by Daniel Sousa, Dean Hamer, and Joe Wilson; Munkha, directed by Alexander Moruo and Markel Martynov; Nangulvi, directed by Wayra Ana Velásquez; Balam, directed by Guillermo Casarin; Hanina/Homesick, directed by Yasmin Moll; and Tiny, directed by Ritchie Hemphill and Ryan Haché. Free for members or with Museum admission in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.
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