33rd annual Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, November 12-15, 2009

The Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at The American Museum of Natural History is the longest-running documentary film festival in the United States. This year’s almost three dozen films includes on opening night movie, Cooking History, which is without question one of the weirder documentaries ever made. Its motto: “6 wars, 10 recipes, 60, 361,024 dead” Its official description:
“What keeps the armies of the world going? Tanks, submarines, airplanes, bullets, bombs? Actually, bread. Bread and blinis and sausage and coq au vin, even “monkey meat” rations. As one cook puts it, without food, the army would be in a shambles. Taking a tour of 20th century battlefields, Peter Kerekes revisits its mess halls and field kitchens, asking the cooks to recreate the meals they served at the front.”

The closing night documentary three days later is Hair India, which is about how Hindu believers who are poor make a ritual sacrifice of their only possession – not money or jewels (as the Hindu rich do), but…their hair. The filmmakers, we are told “follow the course of this hair as it is sheared in an ancient, sacred ritual, sold at auction to the highest bidder, and ends up strutting down the red carpets on top of the world’s most famous heads.”

Films in-between are set in Austria, Bosnia, Czech Republic, China, Croatia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, The Netherlands, and United States. A theme of six of the films is Love Against The Odds -- and focuses on people who have one disability or another.
My favorite title — The Wondrous World of Laundry

Here’s the day-by-day schedule