The objective of the Margaret Mead Film Festival has always been to champion films that portray culture in innovative and surprising ways. From its inception in 1977, when the Festival honored the work of the groundbreaking French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch, it has been alert to originality in the field, from postcolonial and indigenous documentary work to poetic experiments in cross-cultural expression. The Mead has also endeavored to keep pace with revolutions in media-making technologies that have enabled new relationships between filmmakers and subjects, democratizing access for people who had traditionally been the object of the ethnographic gaze. Looking at the ground covered over 35 years and with an eye to the territory ahead, panelists will discuss "What can the innovations in the genre over the last four decades - in terms of the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of ethnographic documentary - help us understand about the future of this kind of work in a rapidly transforming media landscape?" In doing so, we hope panelists and audiences can ask simply: "How do we look - inside the Festival, outside the walls of the Festival, and into the future?"

Panelists: Alanis Obomsawin, filmmaker, whose Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993) screens as part of this year's Mead Retrospective Series; Nancy Christine Lutkehaus, University of Southern California professor of anthropology, gender studies, and political science and author of 2008's Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon; and Elaine Charnov, director for the New York Public Library's Education, Programs, and Exhibitions division and former director of the Margaret Mead Film Festival.

Moderated by Faye Ginsburg, David B. Kriser professor of anthropology and director, Center for Media, Culture, and History, New York University

Introduced by Laurel Kendall, curator and chair of the division of anthropology, American Museum of Natural History

Part of the 35th Anniversary Retrospective Series

Student tickets $6