Happenings: Tribeca Film Festival - Part 2

I watched my second film at the Tribeca Film Festival today--"Sita Sings the Blues." A gorgeous, smart, layered, romantic, tragic, funny modern animated version of the Indian legend of Rama and Sita and their complicated romance (at least from Sita's POV).

The filmmaker, Nina Paley, is one of those humble artistic geniuses that you love and envy all at once. She's a one woman production team, and it took her 5 years to do this film with multiple animation styles from comic strip to Mughal art to cut out animation to shadow puppetry. When Sita "sings" the blues, we are actually hearing little-known blues singer Annette Henshaw's 1920's recordings. The music is just lovely and I wish I could buy the soundtrack. Hell, I wish I could buy the entire movie.

It was a Friday matinée and much more crowded than yesterday when the theater was half filled with elderly couples, elderly mothers with their film geek sons, and loners with their backpacks. Today's film was shown in a much larger theater and filled almost seat for seat with a great cross-section of people (Indians were well-represented, of course) at 3 pm.

Nina Paley and her cast and crew graciously answered questions afterwards. "The Internet's been good to me," she said at one point. Paley helped fund the project from anonymous donations from people who read her blog.The film does not yet have distribution, and apparently people always ask Nina if she plans to show the movie in India, but it's a tricky thing b/c Hindu's might be offended by the portrayal of the god Rama.

Happenings: Tribeca Film Festival - Part 1

I'm a day late with this post, but my love and enthusiasm for Eduoardo Coutinho's "Playing (Jogo de Cena)" is unabated. I know it's a cliche, but the film did make me both laugh and cry, and I think that's a difficult thing for a film to do. More importantly, the film is so deeply human, and you walk away feeling more connected the beauty of the prosaic, especially in your own life.

You sit there and listen to a series of real women tell Coutinho their stories of love, losing children, unwanted pregnancies, bad marriages, complicated relationships with their children, the pursuit of their dreams, and you are reminded of what amazing stories every human being has. But then, the director challenges you even more by editing in footage of actresses "mimicking"(though that word suggests parody, and these actresses actually stay brutally faithful to the real woman she's playing) the same words the real women used in a kind of "staging" of the real woman's interview, and because sometimes Coutinho has the actress telling the story first, and then the real woman, and sometimes vice versa, it's a strange effect - very often it's sometimes impossible to tell who's the real woman and who's the actress.

What's the point, you ask? For me, I think it was a reminder of how real life can have the magic of fiction and how fiction can carry the weight of reality, a thread of humanity--either way, we're moved. I'm grateful for the Tribeca Film Festival for bringing films like this into my life.

One other thing: before the screening, I loved watching the clever, beautiful, striking animations done by the School of Visual Arts students (see photo).

Happenings: Tribeca Film Festival

The Tribeca Film Festival began yesterday--yet another example of a New York institution I've consistently avoided. I guess I always figured I wouldn't be able to get tix to the good stuff and would be stuck watching some lame movie, just to be able to say I went. And the film guide, with it's mucho offerings always scared me a bit.

But, today, inspired by a couple true blue film buff friends, I finally managed to wade through the hundreds of films in the Festival's Film Guide and found that tix were still available to a number of interesting movies...well, weekday matinee tix, at least.

So I'm going to watch "Playing (Jogo de Cena)," a documentary by Brazillian filmmaker that plays with the question of what's true and what's fiction by interspersing interviews with real life women with actresses "playing" these women.

I'm also watching "Sita Sings the Blues," an animated version of the Indian legend, Ramayana, interlaced with a modern love-on-the-rocks tale. It's by comic strip artist, Nina Paley. Isn't the animation fun?