SLEEPWALKING THROUGH THE MEKONG

Wednesday, November 7-------------The Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, the longest-running documentary film festival in the United States, celebrates 31 years of bringing international documentaries to New York audiences with an eclectic program of 29 films from all over the planet. The Festival will unspool at the American Museum of Natural History this coming weekend.

The Festival surveys such timely topics as user-generated Web content, disability and community, struggles with sexual identity in Iran, reincarnated Tibetan lamas, and the digital revolution in China. Films are set in Australia, Bolivia, Cambodia, China, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Namibia, Nepal, and the United States. The festivities begin on Friday evening with the New York Premiere of SLEEPWALKING THROUGH THE MEKONG by John Pirozzi, about the California indie-rock band Dengue Fever's tour through Cambodia with a repertoire of 1960s and 1970s Khmer pop music. The director will be present, as will most of the directors of the films screening throughout the weekend. The intensive weekend of screenigns closes on Sunday night with the screening of NOMADAX TX, by Raul de la Fuente, which follows two Basque musicians as they visit nomadic cultures around the world.

AMNHIn conjunction with WATER: H2O = Life, a major Museum exhibition which opened earlier this week, the Festival features some compelling new films about social and environmental issues related to the precious resource of water. VILLAGE OF DUST, CITY OF WATER, by Sanjay Barnela, tells the chilling tail of rival access to water in India, where rural water supplies are redistributed to serve booming cities and other communities are displaced to create dams; THIRST, directed by Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow,  tells the stories of communities in Bolivia, India, and the United States that are asking about what rights they have to clean and potable water; THE WATER FRONT, directed by Elizabeth Miller, provides a critical look at the battle over water in Highland Park, Michigan, a working-class, largely African-American community whose city council voted to privatize the water supply; GIMME GREEN, directed by Isaac Brown and Eric Flagg, explores the American obsession with lawns and their impact on our environment, our wallets, and our outlook on life; and EL AGUA EN TIEMPOS EXTRAS (Water In Extra Times), directed by Dominique Jonard, is an experimental animation that considers global warming and its impact on water—from floods to droughts—and some of the solutions to help preserve this finite resource.

For a complete list of films screening at this year's Festival, visit: www.amnh.org/mead

Sandy Mandelberger, Film New York Editor