Margaret Mead Film Festival
About the Margaret Mead Film Festival
The American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film Festival, occurring May 2–4, 2025, showcases documentary films that ask crucial questions and explore perspectives from around the world.
Inspired by the groundbreaking use of film and photography by Museum Curator Margaret Mead and her fellow anthropologists in the 1930s, the Mead is the preeminent international showcase for contemporary cultural storytelling. It celebrates visual anthropology’s evolution and emerging technologies, working to create empathy and understanding through documentary, experimental films, animation, hybrid works, and more.
Submissions Now Closed.
Thank you for your interest in the Margaret Mead Film Festival. At this time, submissions are now closed for the 2025 Festival.
All entrants will be notified of their final submission status in early April via email. Please be sure the Margaret Mead Film Festival email address ([email protected]) does not get caught in your spam filter. Please do not call or write to check on your submission.
Filmmaker Awards
The Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award recognizes documentary filmmakers who embody the spirit, energy, and innovation demonstrated by anthropologist Margaret Mead in her research, fieldwork, films, and writings. This award is given to a filmmaker whose feature-length documentary, at least sixty minutes long, shows artistic excellence and originality of storytelling technique. The film must actively honor and accurately represent the communities, cultures, or events depicted, and center the voices depicted in the work.
Filmmakers with works of a minimum sixty minutes in length making their New York City premieres at the festival are eligible. Films that have premiered within the United States but outside of New York City are eligible for the Award.
2024 Filmmaker Award Recipients
On Sunday, May 12, Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie received the 2024 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award for their film, National Geographic Documentary Films’ Sugarcane, which follows a community investigation into Saint Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia, one of more than 500 so-called “residential schools” for Indigenous children in North America.
Mead 2024 also presented its first-ever Audience Award—voted on by attendees from a selection of films making their New York premiere at the festival—to Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó for Agent of Happiness. A touching exploration of the meaning of belonging and purpose in a nation constitutionally mandated to promote the happiness of its citizens, Agent of Happiness invites viewers to discover Bhutan, the “happiest country on Earth,” through the eyes of Amber, a bureaucrat who measures the nation’s “Gross National Happiness.”
2024 Festival Information
The four-day celebration took place from Thursday, May 9–Sunday, May 12, 2024, and presented storytelling, documentary films, and live performances from diverse voices near and far.
