In this year’s 39^th edition the Margaret Mead Film Festival selected for the October 22-25 run 31 long documentaries and 22 short films from 41 countries including those listed in co-productions.  The international character of the films reflects globalization more transparently in this year’s theme than in past editions. Certainly, traditional anthropological and ethnographic  films  are retained in the program showing the struggling persistence of local cultures yet the boundaries  between nations are breaking down and indigenous cultures  no matter where are impacted by economic development and the global challenges  of  climate changes. To use the language of the festivals we are constantly facing thresholds yet frameworks set by time and space are becoming brittle.  There is the impact of tourism in remote areas, containment of radioactive waste, emancipation of women in traditional settings, consequences of corporate “modernization” and privatization in developing countries, de-industrialization and its socio-economic costs, South-North migration and contemporary forms of colonialism to mention some of the themes covered this year. The issues and problems touched by these productions are too numerous to discuss. Yet one wonders how it is possible in the current period of rapid technological and social changes to maintain one’s identity and culture and attain a modicum of control over the forces which impact our lives in Western societies but also the people from developing countries.

THE LAST REFUGE,     Ann-Laure Poree and Guillaume Soun, Cambodia, 2013. Deforestation for foreign owned rubber plantations destroys living space and burial places for the Bunong, a hill tribe in eastern Cambodia.  They lose their culture and ethnic identity and skills passed on from generation to generation such as the craft of weaving. No room is left for the invocation of the spirits and their life cannot be reconciled with the market mechanism of modernity as the juxtaposition of a bulldozer destroying their burial grounds and a traditional ceremony invoking the spirits shows. Their attempts to stop the havoc fail because the local police and authorities cooperate with the companies invading their land.  Nor does the tribe have the knowledge or leadership to mount an effective opposition. As a member puts it “money destroys our values and forests”. Some are indebted and have to sell their land; others are forced to trade good land against bad land.  There is no escape; they have to work for foreign corporations and their loggers to support their families.

DOUBLE HAPPINESS,    Ella Raidel, Austria/China, 2014   In her production Raidel poses some important questions about urban development, architecture, and authenticity yet stays on the surface though her point of departure is fascinating.  Several years ago, Minmetals, one of China’s largest corporations, funded near Huizou where three million people reside a luxury real estate project. Its plan included high rises and 6000 apartments to be sold to upscale Chinese  and had at its core  a  virtual  copy of the small Austrian  mountain village Hallstatt to replicate European style ambiance in the  clean air setting offered by Huizou. To date Hallstatt has been completely replicated, including its church, hotels, shops and restaurant and their insides in all their details. The recreation is so perfect that it amazes visitors from Austria, with at least one HallstaffALLSTATTHall hotel owner now getting copies of her furniture from China. Ma Yang Song, a young Chinese architect, comments about the project with intriguing insights. The massive urban developments involving and displacing hundreds of millions of people as initiated by Chinese authorities do not allow for proper planning and are in most cases shorn of any facilities which are community oriented. The need to rapidly build many high rises prevents architects to be original and forces them to use the same blueprint for many buildings. Thus authenticity in the traditional meaning of the term no longer applies. Rather, copying is more common, including the construction of many theme parks based on foreign cultures. In that sense a Chinese copy of Hallstatt is becoming an Austrian theme park for day trips and marriage photography. It has not attracted international tourists and the luxury apartments are now sold at a discount.

EXIT ZERO, Chris Boebel, Christine Walley, USA, 2015    The directors succeed in this semi-biographical documentary to establish an empirically based analysis of de-industrialization and the impact it had  since the early 1980s on the  south east Chicago families and community where Christine Walley  grew up. Exit Zero is one of the few documentaries which provide illuminating insights into uprooted segments of the industrial working class based on interviews and extensive research into the underlying causes of industrial decline. Christine Walley’s father Charles, a third generation steel maker, was laid off by Wisconsin Steel losing his salary and pension and never worked again in a similar full time job. He experienced with his family downward mobility and was supported by his wife. What is striking about the documentation in this film is that the closure of the steel mill was not the result of an inevitable process such as automation and international competition, but of a clear strategy by its owner, International Harvester (IH) to bankrupt the mill in order to escape pension obligations. This strategy was identified as “a sham’” by federal investigators. It followed five steps: IH fails to maintain the mill with a resultant decline of the quality of the steel. IH sells Wisconsin Steel to Envirodyne, a tiny corporation after providing a $65 million loan to it. IH agrees to buy 30% of the Wisconsin Steel output for the next 10 years but fails to do so. Envirodyne cannot make the loan payment and IH forecloses to get possession of the iron ore mines that served as collateral for the loan. Other lenders foreclose and get the rest of Wisconsin Steel. Workers are locked out of the bankrupt company and have no recourse. As it turned out afterwards the union lawyer was on the Wisconsin Steel payroll. Ironically, US steel mills were profitable in the late 70s but owners looked for higher returns in other areas. The impact on the unemployed workers ranged from alcoholism, premature death rates, suicides, family break ups,  to depressions and isolation.

THE INVISIBLES,  Benjamin Kahlmeyer, Germany, 2014   Hundreds of thousands of refugees are trying to get asylum now in Germany.  European governments face waves of millions in the massive south north migration each year. When Kahlmeyer filmed The Invisibles two years ago with a hand held camera the conditions were not that acute. Still, the audience learns a lot from his careful ethnographic portrait of four young men from the Middle East and Africa and of the German officials they report to.   Coming from different countries and cultures with no linguistic skills they face a mostly sympathetic bureaucracy bound by rigid rules, which remain a mystery to the refugees.  They transit from camp to camp until a resolution of their cases is reached. During that process they are not allowed to work and must stay in the place they are assigned to or lose all benefits. Eventually the four men depicted are all turned down but can stay in Germany with a continued modicum of funding until they have exhausted the appeals process. Throughout the documentary still images are shown of others, of children, women, families, waiting for their disposition. Only migrants from war torn areas such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan have an excellent chance of getting asylum status. Political and economic refugees from other countries do not qualify and the German government is tightening up its rules preparing the country for a growing stream of refugees. In the future this will include more people from the Middle East and Africa who are displaced by climate change. According to the UN globally about 100 million will become climate change refugees.

CONTAINMENT ,  Peter Galison, US / Japan, 2015   In this award winning documentary Galison provides a broadly based assessment  of a serious environmental problem for which there is no solution. There is radioactive large scale ground and water pollution of 70 locations in the United States in which nuclear material was produced for the military. Idled and  existing nuclear power plants   have and are  creating nuclear waste rapidly exceeding their short term storage capacity and no place to go. With few exceptions there are no long term storage facilities and the safety of such storage has been questioned though no realistic alternatives are presented. Neither outer space nor the seas are disposal options. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlbad, New Mexico is the only operating nuclear waste disposal site in the US located in underground salt mines. It had to be closed down because some waste containers were leaking. “Safe” sites are supposed to stay secure for the next 10,000 years. The documentary has animated sequences about the monument preventing access to the WIPP site once closed in fifteen years as mandated by the US department of energy.  But such warning is illusionary since we cannot leapfrog into the future and prevents nuclear leakage.  Galison presents archival and new footage from the Japanse meltdown and its consequences for the Fukushima Prefecture. What happened there can happen again. Nuclear accidents result in radioactive pollution of the soil, contamination of plant life and species, and displacement of villages. Areas have remained so contaminated that one cannot stay there overnight. Those affected have lost control over their lives and certainly have no confidence in the institutions which are supposed to take care of the problem. In the US just cleaning up a contaminated site can cost up to half a billion dollars.

Widely considered one of the best documentary showcases New York has to offer
the Margaret Mead film festival at the American Museum of Natural History lived up to its reputation again

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