In rural coal mining communities in China, miners face daily perils for slim rewards in a profession that claims an estimated 5,000 lives annually. Winner of the 2011 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award Yuanchen Liu delved into this riveting story with his documentary To the Light, and as part of the Margaret Mead Traveling Film Festival, the film and Liu will return to the Museum on Thursday, May 17, at 6:30 pm for a special encore screening and discussion.

Yuanchen Liu, who directed To the Light, a profile of Chinese coal miners, was named the winner of the 2011 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award at the Margaret Mead Film Festival’s closing night on Sunday, November 13. The award honors filmmakers that embody the spirit of renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead while showing artistic excellence and originality of storytelling.

Call it the antithesis of Grey Gardens. While that famous documentary showed how Hamptons socialite Edith Beale and her daughter oversaw the eponymous estate’s slide into squalor, the inhabitants of the 17th-century monastery in Portugal at the heart of Convento, a selection at this year’s Margaret Mead Film Festival, lovingly resurrected a ruin into a home full of life and art.

In the horror-film genre “nature gone wild,” masses of murderous insects and animals are a staple, from the hornets in Swarmed to cockroaches in They Crawl, killer worms in Squirmto rats in Willard, and, of course, the birds in, well, The Birds. But can anything be more chilling than the real thing?

Over 10,000 Native Americans of the Mohawk tribe live on the Akwesasne reservation in upstate New York—and every family in the community has included an ironworker. For decades, these men have weekly made the six-hour drive to New York City to build its tallest skyscrapers. Katja Esson’s film Skydancer, which will be shown at the Margaret Mead Film Festival on Sunday, November 13, at 2 pm, follows a group of Mohawk “sky walkers” as they continue the craft of their forefathers, spending weeks apart from their families and risking their lives for a job that pays well but also perpetuates superhuman stereotypes of Mohawk men.

Following the screening of Skydancer, Bear Fox andKatsitsionni Fox, who appear in the documentary, along withRobby Baier, the composer of the film’s score, will perform traditional Mohawk songs. Esson, who will attend the Mead Festival screening of the documentary and participate in a Q&A immediately afterward, recently answered a few questions about the film.