For 32 years, the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival has brought documentaries from around the world to the Museum's theaters. Begun as an exhibition of ethnographic films by anthropologists who were recording cultures seemingly remote from our own, the Festival has also come to embrace the documentary as an evolving art form. So much more than a record of communities and events, the documentary employs techniques traditionally reserved for fiction films, such as animation, dramatic interpretation, and portraiture. As always at the Mead, we offer exposure to worlds perhaps foreign to our experience—African thumb-piano players, Laotian bomb technicians, primate scientists in Abkhazia, prostitutes in Phnom Penh, Manhattan pre-schoolers—all portrayed in a variety of documentary styles. Yet the experience should be about more than observing our world and the pleasure of watching films. Just as you would comment on the artifacts and animals as you stroll the Museum's exhibition halls, we encourage you to discuss what you see on the screen with fellow audience members during the many post-film Q&As, with the person sitting beside you, or over coffee with friends. The hope is that long after the Festival ends you will continue to share with others what you've seen—perhaps even until the Festival rolls around again next year. Ariella Ben-Dov, Festival Director

Join us Thursday, November 13, for a discussion with Nancy Lutkehaus about her new book Margaret Mead: American Icon.