The Margaret Mead Traveling Film and Video Festival came to Cal State Long Beach Friday night.
The free event, hosted by the Anthropology Graduate Student Association, humbled the viewers’ hearts with three graphic documentaries from around the world and left some with a greater appreciation of life.
The Margaret Mead Film Festival is a long-running showcase of recent documentaries that focus on diverse, worldly subjects that may be modern or have primitive perspectives.
The goal of the festival is to raise a national consciousness about diversity, cultures and issues affecting the world and people’s way of life.
“This has been a pretty successful series,” said Steven Rousso-Schindler, CSULB assistant professor of anthropology and organizer, in a press release. “The Mead specializes in visual anthropology, a subfield of cultural anthropology that is concerned with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and new media.”
The first film, “Shooting With Mursi,” took place in a nearly inaccessible area of Ethiopia called the Omo Valley. The Mursi are a nomadic tribe who are most famously known for their women’s large lip plates and colorful dresses.
The film was aimed at showing how the Mursi are losing their culture from increasing tourism, encroaching national parks and occasional fighting with neighboring tribes.
The fighting among the tribes is often fatal because the tribes in the area are armed with Kalashnikov rifles, left behind from Russian troops during the Cold War. With only 9,000 Mursi left, they face an extinction of their culture.
“Shooting With The Mursi” was filmed by a male member of the tribe. Olisarali Olibui takes the viewer into the Mursi culture and offers a unique perspective into the customs of the Mursi which could not be filmed by the regular anthropologist.
The second film, “A Mountain Musical,” was 52 minutes in length and was a bizarre documentary filled with moments of comedy, gore, boredom and insight. Austrian filmmaker Eva Eckert goes deep into the Alps to a town that has been mining ore since the Roman empire.
Eckert documents a folk culture of yodeling commoners who sing about nationalism, hard work, hard drinking and merry making.
One woman yodeled an old Nazi pride song and spoke of her memories of yodeling the song with friends when she was a child during the Nazi regime.
There were many correlations between these remote people of these Austrian Alps and the locals of the American Ozark mountains.
A graphic scene of a pig being slaughtered while blood gushes from its jugular artery and men spectate while drinking vodka and yodeling joyfully gave the audience a harsh view of this film’s robust nature.
The last film was called “There Once was an Island.” Directed by Briar March in 2010, he tells the story of a Papua New Guinea island community who are experiencing the first effects of rising sea levels due to climate change.
The locals, whose main source of substance is giant taro plant farming and fishing, are literally watching their home crumble beneath their feet from the rising sea.
This story shows the struggles people will endure when forced to leave behind everything they have ever known and the daunting challenge of beginning a new life in an unfamiliar land.
For more information about the Margaret Mead Film Festival, visit its website at amnh.org/programs/mead.
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