Margaret Mead Film Festival

Overview

If you like documentaries, then you'll want to meet Margaret Mead ... in a manner of speaking. Mead is the late, great cultural anthropologist, who clocked some 52 years working at the American Museum for Natural History and championed the popular appeal of her profession. This commemorative festival began way back in 1976, making it America's longest running celebration of international documentaries.

Now coming to Australia for the first time, a select seven documentaries will carve out their very different windows on the world, from the comfort of the Australian Museum. Kicking off the seven weeks of Tuesday night screenings is a Q&A presentation of Darlene Johnson's River of No Return, which ventures alongside 45-year-old mother Frances Daingangan as she is cast in Rolf de Heer's acclaimed Ten Canoes and into a reality vastly different from her own.

In Cooking History, Peter Kerekes tests the old adage, "an army marches on its stomach," while Sergiy Bukovsky's The Living remembers Stalin's devastating starvation of Ukraine's rural population. The complexities of Hindi culture are personified by an aged medicine man in Babaji, an Indian Love Story, and the experiences of four blind couples are brought to remarkable, sensory depth in Juraj Lehotsky's Blind Loves. The Last Days of Shishmaref starkly show how global warming threatens to end 4000 years of occupation and make the world's first climate-change refugees of the Inupiaq Eskimos, whereas Hotel Sahara finds the meeting of the Saharan desert and the Atlantic Ocean a deeply symbolic setting for the precarious lives of refugees.