A still from Brimstone and Glory.
By Nancy Novick
This year’s Margaret Mead Film Festival opens Thursday night with cinematic fireworks! Brimstone and Glory, directed by Victor Jakovleski, documents the annual pyrotechnics festival in Tultepec, Mexico. The city plays host to visitors from near and far with a celebration that features a range of spectacles including a “burning of the bulls”, in which participants run amid bull-shaped floats, toritos, rigged with fireworks. Like many of the more than 40 nonfiction films to be screened over the weekend, Brimstone and Glory will be followed by a discussion with the filmmakers.
The film fest is held at the Museum of Natural History.
Other anticipated highlights offering cross-cultural perspectives include:
- Lust for Sight, in which documentarian Manuel von Sturler confronts his gradual loss of vision.
- We Don’t Need a Map, a feature-length exploration of the rise of racism in Australia that focuses on the appropriation by white nationalists of the Southern Cross—a constellation with great cultural importance to Australia’s indigenous people—as a symbol of the “Aussie Swazi”.
- Brothers, a film making its U.S. premiere, that follows two elderly brothers, one a scientist and one a painter, who survived a Stalinist labor camp and have lived together for decades in rural Poland.
- Pre-Crime, a work that recalls Phillip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report” (in which suspects were identified before they committed a crime) as it describes how widespread surveillance and new technologies may impact our justice system.
- A Queer Country, an Israeli film that offers insights into the LGBT community in Tel Aviv and its relationship with the Orthodox Jewish community.
Festival events and activities, which are organized under the theme “Activate”, also include an art installation, special events and dialogues, and the Mead Mixed Media Lounge that incorporates augmented and virtual reality.
Sunday evening will mark the close of the festival when the winner of the 2017 Margaret Mead Filmmakers Awards will be announced, followed by an encore screening of the prize-winning film. According to organizers, this award “recognizes artistic excellence and originality of storytelling technique that offers a new perspective on a culture or community remote from the majority of the festival audiences’ experience.”
For a full schedule of festival screening and events and to view trailers, visit www.amnh.org/mead.
Margaret Mead came to Whittier College ! A relative of mine had another story, maybe , of near the Museum of Natural History.
Margaret Mead was also an Upper West Sider! She lived in the Beresford while working across the street at the American Museum of Natural History! And the legacy lives on. Both her daughter and her granddaughter were in attendance at the opening night of the film festival.