The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival 2003 at Pacific Film Archive

Thursdays and Fridays, November 6, 7, 13, 14, 20, 21

Pacific Film Archive is very pleased to present eleven films from The Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival 2003 at the PFA Theater, located at 2575 Bancroft Way near Bowditch Street, on Thursday and Friday evenings from November 6 through November 21. This vibrant festival, which is organized each year by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is North America's preeminent showcase for ethnographic cinema-a genre that has expanded far beyond academic records of anthropological excursions to include a fascinating array of unique and often quirky views of cultures and communities around the globe. PFA presents these screenings in association with the Ethnographic Film Course of the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Among the highlights in this year's festival are films about sports, unusual families and unusually accomplished female relatives, and reflections on an elite prep school in India. Football, Iranian Style celebrates girls secretly practicing their soccer skills, and fandom in Tehran and among Iranian immigrants in Germany, while joyfully demonstrating the relationship between sports and a nation's psyche. My Flesh and Blood is an inspiring record of Fairfield resident Susan Tom's family of eleven adopted children with special needs. This award-winning documentary (it received the audience and best director prizes for documentary at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival) follows a year in the life of Tom and her children; they may lack legs, or have scars from burns, or other health difficulties, but they enjoy a happy family life. Local filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt's short film I Used to Be a Filmmaker presents wry observations on fatherhood.

Two films celebrate remarkable relatives. Suzanne Wasserman, in Thunder in Guyana, presents the story of her aunt, a Jewish grandmother from Chicago who, in 1997, was elected president of Guyana. Filmmaker Idrissou Mora-Kpai's mother, a queen in his native Benin, is the subject of The Queen Mother.

The New Boys, by esteemed visual anthropologist David MacDougall, studies India's elite Doon School.

A series schedule follows. Advance tickets, which are $8 for general admission, can be purchased evenings at the PFA Theater Box Office, and weekdays from 11 am to 5pm at the Berkeley Art Museum admission desk (2626 Bancroft Way), or by telephoning (510) 642-5249. The schedule of programs follows on the other side of this page. For more information, please phone PFA at (510) 642-1412.

Schedule of screenings