Admission to the Movie Talk is free and open to the public. Admission for BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO is at regular Ross prices. The Movie Talk series is sponsored by the Friends of the Ross.

BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO delves into the ineffable mystery of Japan's age-old love affair with insects. A labyrinthine meditation on nature, beauty, philosophy and Japanese culture that might just make you question if your 'instinctive' repulsion to bugs is merely a trick of western conditioning.

“An expansive take on the world in miniature, Jessica Oreck's documentary debut pursues all angles on a novel subject -- the Japanese obsession with insects -- until it assumes a worldview.”—Eric Hynes, Village Voice

BRETT RATCLIFFE
Dr. Brett Ratcliffe is the Curator of Insects at the University of Nebraska State Museum (where he directs the Team Scarab lab) and a Professor in the Dept. of Entomology at UNL. He is a specialist in the systematics of scarab beetles, especially those of the Neotropics. He has conducted extensive field research in Japan (where he lived for four years), the United States, Mexico, Central America, South America, and South Africa. From 1976 to 1978 he was the head of the systematics research collections of entomology for the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus, Brazil while on a leave-of-absence from UNL. He is a Research Associate of the Department of Entomology at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution) in Washington, D. C. In 1980 he was selected by the National Academy of Sciences for a brief scientific exchange with the German Democratic Republic (then East Germany). He is the former President and Secretary of the Coleopterists Society, which promotes the study of beetles. For the past several years he has conducted extensive biodiversity inventories of the scarab beetles of Nebraska and the dynastine scarabs for all of Central America. He received the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Research and Creativity Award (ORCA) in 2001. He is the author of 150 scientific papers, numerous popular articles, 6 books about scarab beetles, and 150 species of beetles new to science.

See the trailer at: http://www.beetlequeen.com/home.html