The Margaret Mead Festival, the preeminent showcase for contemporary cultural and media conversation set in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, has announced its lineup for this year's edition, including three Latin American feature films as well as two shorts.
Featuring 16 U.S. premieres with a wide variety of subjects, this year's festival slate will explore the theme "See for Yourself," in which audiences are asked to reflect on how we perceive culture through various artistic narratives and forms as well as how our identities shape how we look and see.
The Latin American lineup of feature films includes the German-Guatemalan co-production Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth directed by Frauke Sandig and Erick Black, which follows six young Maya and their indigenous perspectives on their ancestors' convictions. Otilia Portillo Padua's Three Voices / Diario a tres voces, (pictured left), is about three generations of Mexican women who sit in their homes and reflect on love and sex in a rich visual world inspired by '40s technicolor films.
Completing the lineup of feature films is Mexican film Calle López (pictured right), directed by Gerardo Barroso and Lisa Tillinger, in which the directors and their child move to the noisy and vibrant Calle López to document it. Barroso and Tillinger will be competing for the Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award, given to a filmmaker whose feature documentary displays artistic excellence and originality of storytelling technique while offering a new perspective on a culture or community remote from the majority of the audience's experience.
The short films selected include Laura Murray's A Kiss for Gabriela / Um Beijo para Gabriela, following cultural icon Gabriela Leite, the first sex worker to run for Brazilian congress. Murray's film is a part of the Emerging Visual Anthropologists Showcase. The second film, The Barrel / El Galón, directed by Anabel Rodríguez Ríos, illustrates life in a floating village through the eyes of a child, juxtaposing poverty and wealth through Venezuela's oil industry.
The Margaret Mead Film Festival will run from October 17 - 20.
