Arts Shorts

Head for the Borders

El Inmigrante

Every year, New York’s American Museum of Natural History presents the Margaret Mead Film Festival, billed as “the longest-running, premiere showcase for international non-fiction media in the United States.” Last fall, the festival featured films on topics ranging from Second Life to water privatization to sexuality in modern Iran. The traveling version of the festival, which the UO’s museum of Natural and Cultural History presents this month, offers a thematic group of films that this year “illuminate cultural issues surrounding border areas.” China Blue looks at the lives of young women struggling to survive while working in a jeans factory in South China. El Inmigrante focuses on the story of a Mexican migrant who was killed while traveling north. And in Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, former marine biologist Randy Olson opts to look not at the rights and wrongs of this testy debate, but at the ways both sides are communicating with the public. The New York Times wrote that Olson’s film “challenges [scientists] to get off their collective high horse and make their case to ordinary people with — if they can muster it — a smile.”

The festival begins this Friday, Feb. 8, with China Blue and continues with El Inmigrante on Feb. 15 and Flock of Dodos on Feb. 22. All screenings begin at 5:30 pm at 175 Knight Law, UO. $3, students free. — Molly Templeton

Architecture Lecture Cut Short

The fifth lecture in the UO architecture department’s Savage lecture series ended early Tuesday, Feb. 5, when lecturer Azhar Tyabji collapsed in the middle of his talk about rebuilding the Indian city of Bhuj after a 2001 earthquake. Though Tyabji retained consciousness, an ambulance took him to Sacred Heart Medical Center. Series organizer Howard Davis says that Tyabji was given a clean bill of health and quickly released from the hospital. UO professor Kenneth Calhoon delivers the next lecture, about the rebuilding of Dresden after WWII, at 7:30 pm Tuesday, Feb. 12, in 177 Lawrence on the UO campus. More info available at architecture.uoregon.edu or 346-3656. — Suzi Steffen