Mararet Mead Film Fest 2007

This previous weekend - Nov. 9-11th, the 31st annual Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival took place at the Museum of Natural History and was a great venue for these contemporary visual ethnographies. The Museum itself was a buzz with its usual sunny Sunday crowds thirsting for knowledge, and it was great to work our way towards the screenings by weaving in and out of various wings, rooms, and people to finally get to the rather small festival.

The first film I attended was Judith MacDougall's The Art of Regret. This was a very intimate film directed, produced, and shot by MacDougall and her translator in China. The focus of the ethnography was on how the Chinese use, view, and bring meaning to photographs in their culture. It brought up many points about how China is very much at a cross roads in their understanding of the past and the future. In China it is very hard to get a hold of older photos as many were destroyed during their Cultural Revolution and this has taken a toll on many individual families who have lost their pasts. Also the film explores the new steps in technology and how these images can be manipulated or restored by the same digital means. The film leaves the audience wondering if photography is still an art of regret or if it has reached a new place/definition in its history.

The second film we sat in on (literally on the floor) was The Birthday by Daisy Mohr and Negin Kianfar. This film chronicled the lives of trans gendered people in Iran, a conservative Islamic government. I went into the film with much different expectations of what I would see, and enjoyed being surprised. While being very anti-homosexual, the Iranian government is actually quite supportive of their transgender folk who wish to change their sex, due to a strange Islamic loophole in the Koran. The stories of the people the filmmakers followed around were quite emotionally effective and poignant. Despite thinking that the Iranian government was very tolerant at first, I realized later that the only reason they favor this is because it reinforces their belief system and doesn't challenge the preestablished binaries that their culture lives in.

All in all I really enjoyed the Festival and liked seeing these fresh works as opposed to the classics we've been viewing in class. The stories of human struggle, history, and joy are always interesting and it was nice to see it all in such a setting of learning and knowledge.