Academy Award-nominated director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan), who will lead the Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award jury, shares his excitement for the festival and what the art of documentary means to him in a video interview. For more information on the festival, which takes place from November 10 to November 13, visit amnh.org/mead2011.

Seventeen-year-old Joshua had fond memories of swimming in Arkansas’s Strawberry River, a popular site for community gatherings and picnics. But after the construction of a wastewater treatment facility upstream, no one would enter the waters. “The wonderland where I spent so many hours as a child is deserted now, and nobody swims or fishes in that section of the river,” Joshua would later write. “I decided to find out for myself if the [facility] had indeed contaminated the water, or if the community had overreacted.”

The ongoing restoration of the Museum’s iconic Hall of North American Mammals, which will be completed in Fall 2012, was featured in a New York Times video this weekend. Look for the full story in the Sunday, October 23 paper’s Fine Arts & Exhibits section.

With the conclusion of NASA’s shuttle program and the upcoming launch of the latest Mars rover, the future of space exploration is once again a hot topic—and humans’ first steps on the Moon are all the more important to revisit.

On October 25, join Apollo historian Andrew Chaikin and the Museum’s Director of Astrovisualization Carter Emmart for October’s Astronomy Live program, Fly Me to the Moon. The evening begins at 6:30 pm and includes a flight simulation to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor using the latest data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, along with mapping photographs taken from lunar orbit by the Apollo astronauts 40 years ago.

Chaikin recently answered a few questions about his passion for space exploration.

The protagonists of We Still Live Here and Flames of God, two of the selections in this year’s Margaret Mead Film Festival, live worlds apart, but they share a remarkably similar passion: to preserve their unique languages and codify them in dictionaries where none existed before.

For Jessie “Little Doe” Baird, the quest involves reviving her ancestors’ language, Wampanoag, one of many Algonquin tongues that have gone extinct despite their echoes across her corner of Cape Cod: Sippewisset, Hyannis, Narragansett. Director Anne Makepeace’s film We Still Live Here, which will be shown on Saturday, November 12, follows Baird as she studies linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and forges a friendship with the late Kenneth Hale, a scholar of indigenous languages. Makepeace will be in attendance at this year’s Margaret Mead Film Festival.