In the first weekend of May, a group of graduate and undergraduate students from Cornell University attended the Margaret Mead Film Festival, one of the longest-running and most prestigious showcases of ethnographic and documentary films in the world. The trip was organized as an experiential learning initiative connected to coursework in visual anthropology and ethnographic film theory, and it brought together students encompassing different departments and programs in Cornell: History, Anthropology, Environmental Engineering, Historic Preservation Planning, Media Studies, and Musicology.
The festival trip also extended a thread of inquiry that had developed throughout the spring semester via a companion Exploring Ethnographic Film Series at Cornell Cinema, organized as part of an ethnographic film theory course taught by Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts, and Media Studies Affiliated Faculty, Natasha Raheja, who also organized the trip to the Margaret Mead Festival.
Held every year at the American Museum of Natural History, the Margaret Mead Film Festival has since 1977 gathered filmmakers, anthropologists, and publics around the questions that ethnographic cinema is uniquely positioned to ask. Across three days, the films explored enduring and newly urgent questions about human diversity, past and present, and the different ways people relate to one another, animals, land, and ideas.
This year’s programming organized itself around two pressing threads: the relationship between nature and humans and the unfolding politics of environmental precarity, alongside the textures of coming-of-age and international connections across cultures. A particular highlight for the group was Bucks Harbor, directed by Pete Muller — a poignant and, at turns, genuinely funny portrait of masculinity, working-class fragility, and the emotional complexity of growing up in a Maine finishing community. The film’s power lay in how it held space for humor and tenderness within a story about a way of life under slow economic and ecological erosion. The attentiveness to the everyday lives of the film’s multiple protagonists, as a site of where working-class relations unfold amidst a torturous weather, made it one of the most discussed films of the weekend. It was no surprise when Bucks Harbor was awarded the Audience Award as well as received a Special Jury Mention. Other films such as Time and Water and We Are the Fruits of the Forest also captured questions of ecological precarity — land under threat, communities navigating slow environmental violence, and the forms of knowledge and practice that persist in spite of it. Several films used sound in an innovative way to convey the intricate relationship between humans and nonhumans, capitalizing on the unique position of film as an audiovisual medium. Time and Water employed extraordinary sound technologies to record glaciers, creating a mode of communication with them, while Daughters of the Forest animated mushrooms through a distinct voice-over that positioned them as protagonists in the film.
As part of the festival’s environmental focus, many films engaged questions of time and intergenerational relations. Whispers in May, We Are the Fruits of the Forest and Daughters of the Forest all explored the role of intergenerational transmission in the face of destruction and erasure. Tracing how identity, care, and cultural practices are negotiated across generations in contexts of displacement and change, ethnographic cinema emerged in the festival as a kind of “time capsule”— the organizing metaphor of Time and Water. The cinematic medium, together with anthropology’s heterogeneous sensibility to time, allowed these films to portray intergenerational conversations that cut across painful histories, precarious presents, and futures shaped by both hope and dread.
Just as unforgettable was Black Zombie, directed by Maya Annik Bedward, which won the Mead Filmmaker Award. The film excavates the origins of the zombie figure in Haitian spirituality, tracing its roots in colonial violence, resistance, and Voodoo cosmology, before tracking how that figure was stripped of its political and spiritual significance and absorbed into Hollywood as a horror spectacle. Intellectually rigorous, the film provoked on the festival’s most animated post-screening discussions about representation and appropriation. For students working on questions of race and colonial history, and anyone interested in horror films, this was an essential viewing.
Across three days Cornell students watched around ten films, where seeing difficult and beautiful things also mattered in ways harder to account for. Documentary film is, among other things, a collective sensory experience. The affective dimensions of watching — what moves us, what unsettles us, what we turn to each other to process — animate the sensibility of encountering urgent questions of climate change collectively. Several students noted afterward that the festival reoriented our understanding of what theory when realized through the various components of the footage in telling a story can do. As Xintong Chen, a graduate student in History, noted when talking about the film Fruits of Forest, “the incorporation of folktales amplifies how story-telling and dream could inspire or even become part of real lives". The Q&A sessions that followed each screening were illuminating, particularly hearing filmmakers speak about access, ethics, aesthetics, and the years-long relationships that made their films possible. While these questions of reflexive practice were some things that were discussed in classrooms, encountering the film in its full public context were also reminders of how institutions, such as Cornell and the AMNH, that house and circulate ethnographic knowledge are themselves objects of critical attention.
This initiative was made possible through the generous support of Cornell Media Studies, the Cornell Department of Anthropology, the Einhorn Center for Community and Civic Engagement, Cornell Cinema, the American Museum of Natural History’s Public Programs, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival. Their investment in connecting media production and media studies coursework with public programming reflects a shared commitment to the idea that learning happens in seminar rooms as well as cinemas, museums, and the conversations that spill out onto the sidewalk afterward.
