From AD 600 to 1200, goods were exchanged, laborers migrated, and cultures converged along what historians now call the Silk Road. While most of Europe was cloaked in the darkness of the Middle Ages, a flourishing network of civilizations stretched from the Mediterranean to the easternmost shores of Asia, with hubs in Baghdad, Samarkand, Turfan, and Xi’an. In conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History’s Traveling the Silk Road exhibition, the Mead presents a series of films that illuminates our own metaphorical Silk Road, along which goods and ideas travel in centuries-old grooves and where modern industries and technologies have generated new pathways for the ongoing evolution of culture. The opening night film, Cooking History, takes us across the battlefields of the 20th century, where even the destructive force of war has contributed to culinary and cultural exchange. In Hair India, which closes the festival, sacrificial hair shorn in a Hindu temple is transported to a factory in Bangalore, to a distributor in Rome, then back to India’s finest salons. In Babaji, an Indian Love Story, a Hindu man embraces the burial practices of another religion in hopes of being reunited with his beloved wife. Finally, Hotel Sahara, about Africans looking for a way into Europe, and 7915 KM, about Europeans racing through northeastern Africa to Dakar, demonstrate how, for better and worse, we continue to carve new grooves into the world.

The Presenting Sponsor of Traveling the Silk Road is

Additional support has been provided by Mary and David Solomon.

The Silk Road Project residency is generously supported by Rosalind P. Walter.