Margaret Mead Film Festival Returns After Pandemic Hiatus, Countering Worrisome Trend In Festival Space

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: The Human Rights Watch Film Festival recently announced it’s closing down, and the future of Hot Docs remains uncertain at best.

But there’s some hopeful news for the troubled film festival space: the return of the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York.

The longest running nonfiction film festival in the U.S. reemerges May 9, after being dark since the pandemic. The four-day event will showcase documentary films from across the globe, as well as animation, panel discussions, and live performances, all from its home base at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. [Scroll for the full program] “Mead 2024 gives platform to new voices that inspire fresh conversations about our shared humanity,” noted Jacqueline Handy, director of public programs at the American Museum of Natural History, adding the festival has been “a vibrant part of the Museum landscape since 1977.” The festival kicks off on Thursday, May 9 with Soundtrack ‘63, “a live, music and multimedia retrospective of the Black experience in America.” The following evening will see the New York premiere of Sugarcane, the award-winning documentary that investigates the legacy of residential schools in British Columbia where Indigenous children were separated from their families and systematically deprived of their language and culture, coercing them to assimilate into white Canadian society.

Sugarcane directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, who won the U.S. Documentary directing award for their film at Sundance, will participate in a Q&A following the Margaret Mead premiere. (National Geographic, which acquired the film out of Sundance, will open the film in theaters later this year).