Margaret Mead Traveling Film & Video Festival returns to campus

Included in the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival is "Why Pay Two Rents?" a documentary about longtime partners Stan Selub and Paul Miller, which shows as part of the first program March 17 at 7:30 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre.

This past November, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival celebrated its 25th anniversary, and Cornell Cinema presents four nights from the anniversary lineup on four consecutive nights, Sunday, March 17, through Wednesday, March 20, during spring break. Each program will be shown at 7:30 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. The series is co-sponsored with the GreenStar Cooperative Market, and members who show their GreenStar membership card at the box office can get in for the student price of $4. General admission is $5 (students and seniors $4). For details about each program, visit http://cinema.cornell.edu.

The festival is named in honor of anthropologist Margaret Mead, who worked in the American Museum of Natural History's anthropology department from 1926 until her death in 1978 and was a pioneer in the field of cultural anthropology. She also was one of the first to recognize the significance of using film in fieldwork and produced the now classic titles "Trance and Dance in Bali," "Learning to Dance in Bali" and "Karba's First Years," while working among the Balinese from 1936 to 1938. The festival -- which is the only anthropological film festival in the United States -- maintains a commitment to presenting works on cross-cultural issues and has been devoted to realizing Mead's goal of informing "general audiences" about similarities and differences in cultural practices.

In honor of the 25th anniversary, the first program includes famed ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch's 1977 portrait of Mead, made shortly before her death. The second program, "Women and Healthcare," includes a new film on midwives in India and a 1986 film by British anthropologist and filmmaker Melissa Llewelyn-Davies that captures a busy hospital ward in East London through the poignant and candid stories of its nurses. The third program, "Power to the People," includes the Yugoslavian documentary "The Making of a Revolution," and it will have you on the edge of your seat as you watch a youth opposition group help bring down Slobodan Milosevic's government. The final program, "Spotlight: Indonesia," features two pieces from the Jakarta International Film Festival that explore the culture of political conflict in Aceh, an embattled region in northern Sumatra.