The 2014 Margaret Mead Film Festival kicks off this week with a promising slate of socially and culturally provocative films. Running from October 23-26, this year's theme, titled "Past Forward," means to integrate senses of culture and activity with the onrunning Margaret Mead initiative to showcase innovations in film and new media. 

Featured in the festival is the TFF co-presentated documentary Soul Food Stories about a small town in Bulgaria where Islamic Turks and Orthodox Bulgarians live quiet, peaceful lives together, resisting all preconceptions about the region's cultural differences. Join Bulgarian filmmaker Tonislav Hristov and the local community of Satovchka as they sit down to a meal and talk about homophobia, women's rights, poltical differences - every issue the community faces. 

Tickets for this movie and the rest of the festival are available now through the American Museum of Natural History's website. The screening of Soul Food Stories is preceded by the Mead Mixer happy hour, so you can meet filmmakers and other festival attendees before catching the screening.