Beyond Bollywood: 3rd I premieres the first S.F. South Asian film festival
October 31, 2003
Saturday, Nov. 1
Castro Theater
429 Castro St., San Francisco
Shiraz
2 p.m.
Flying With One Wing
(Tani Tatuwen Piyabanna)
6 p.m.
Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham
8:15 p.m.
Sunday, Nov. 2
Roxie Theatre
3117 16th St., San Francisco
My Mother India
(plus short films)
2 p.m.
DAM/Age
(plus short film)
4 p.m.
Road to Ladakh
(plus short film)
6 p.m.
A Nation Without Women
(Matrubhumi)
8 p.m.
So it’s high time for a San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival — presented by 3rd I, a national nonprofit (with chapters in S.F., New York and Washington, D.C.) devoted to promoting diverse images of South Asians in independent film.
3rd I hosts screenings once a month in each of its chapter cities, and this is its first festival. Judging from the films — which range from A Nation Without Women’s futuristic take about female infanticide and DAM/Age’s reportage on the political work of Arundahti Roy, to the 1928 silent film Shiraz’s gentle fable about the origins of the Taj Mahal and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’s melodramatic Bollywood camp — the programmers have wide-ranging and provocative tastes with a knack for picking some real finds, particularly in the documentary field. Here are some short takes of some of the festival’s films:
Flying With One Wing
Asoka Handagama’s Flying With One Wing has a lot of hype to live up to. 3rd I extravagantly bills the indie feature as the “most revolutionary South Asian film this year” — a “Sri Lankan Boys Don’t Cry mixed with Fassbinder.” And you can see where it’s coming from — though Flying With One Wing is nowhere near as rigorously Brechtian and conceptually leather-clad as FassbinderÕs work.
Flying With One Wing’s protagonist is a riveting drag king who spends a lot of time in the loo, smoking, thinking guy/girl thoughts and sometimes even loosening the wraps around her chest and enjoying a gulp of air or two. She spends her days working at a car repair shop, fending off the comical, unwanted advances of seemingly every gay man in her small town — including her doctor and her coworker. Other things on her must-do list: avoiding group showers with the other mechanics, making love to her wife with the lights off and the curtains drawn, and protecting the spouse from the rowdiness of the soccer-playing toughs on their street. Otherwise, our heroine is continually scampering out of the arms of thumb-sucking suitors, even as across town, a bit less comically, her boss is groping his secretary, and at the doctor’s office, one weeping woman after another is bemoaning the fact that they’ve been impregnated by their rapists. YouÕd choose to crossdress as well.
The film can look pretty rough and tumble, yet Handagama has a knack for juxtaposing a gritty terracotta palette of street scenes with almost banal images made surreal. Flying With One Wing may not stand up to sublime melodrama of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but it’s a class of its own for its sheer bravery.
DAM/Age
Writer and activist Arundhati Roy won the much-coveted Booker Prize in 1998 for her acclaimed first novel, The God of Small Things, but she didn’t sit back on her laurels and simply rake in the royalties: She began writing about and working against India’s nuclear bomb test and then the Narmada dam project in India, which was expected to displace as many as a million people.
Filmmaker Aradhana Seth opens the documentary DAM/Age with the arrest and closed-door judgment on Roy, who was accused of degrading the authority of the Indian Supreme Court, which lifted a hold on the dam’s construction. Seth paints Roy as a compelling, passionate artist drawn increasingly into activism. The fragile, pixie-cut Roy proves herself a fierce advocate for disenfranchised people with few forums, just at the very moment she is offered a worldwide platform as a best-selling author.
Seth captures all the ironies. Here, the writer talks sympathetically to villagers protesting the dam. There, she prepares for court and plots her next moves in elegant, ultramodern living quarters. Here, Roy reads from The Cost of Living, her nonfiction follow-up to The God of Small Things, counting the number of big dams constructed in India, but finding distressingly few numbers for the amount of rural indigenous people and untouchables made homeless and indigent by the construction projects.
The Narmada Valley story has parallels throughout modern India and unfortunately the rest of the world, Roy notes, concerning “who counts, who doesn’t, what matters, what doesn’t, what counts as a cost, what doesn’t.” Regardless of your position on the controversy, what is certain is the writer’s sincerity as she also brings it back, with disarming unpretentiousness, to her past, and talks about the sorrow she feels picturing the destruction of a river. “The river was my friend …,” she says. “And the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing.”
My Mother India
Documentarian Safina Uberio takes a loving look at her fascinating, biracial family in My Mother India. Like a good conversationalist, Uberio kicks it all off with a funny story — an opening anecdote about the neighborhood scandal triggered by the fact that her Australian mother’s panties would hang on a clothesline in full public view. “There was always a debate about whether I should show up to the school meeting,” Uberio’s mother says with a chuckle, looking as impish as a fresh-faced, red-haired Catholic schoolgirl.
When Uberio’s mother and father, an Indian Sikh professor, met and married in Australia (where he was at work on his Ph.D.) — their marriage sent ripples of anxiety through the bride’s side, which never ended up daring to visit their beloved daughter in India. Uberio’s father’s family was much more accepting — ironic then that her Sikh grandfather’s death would coincide with the terrifying community violence, bombings and killings that broke out after a 1984 government attack on the country’s most important Sikh temple and the resulting assassination of Indira Gandhi.
The family is thrown into turmoil and fragments, becoming a symbol for an India torn apart by violence and distrust, a country rent by issues of personal and group identity. Once Uberio draws you in with her humor, she never lets out, keeping you enthralled by charging her personal narrative with the urgency, scope and complexity of history.
Road to Ladakh
Along from Shiraz, the novella-like short feature Road to Ladakh has the distinction of one of the best-looking films in the film festival. Gorgeous mountainous terrain and silvery expanses of Ladakh, or the Land of the Purple Moon, are the setting for this road movie-of-sorts.
Two mysterious strangers meet at a dusty rest stop. Sharon may be a photojournalist or she may simply be a jet-setting coke queen; regardless, she has a nameless sunburnt man on her trail, after her for his spare tire, which was put on her car by mistake. Or is he after her for other reasons? Is it romance, a case of mistaken identity or possessions, or something more sinister? There’s definitely no directive for, say, Bollywood-style non-smooches here: director Ashvin Kumar sees himself as part of a new wave of filmmakers who are weary of stereotypes and want to work with modern characters.
For information on other screenings and more at the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival, go to www.thirdi.org/festival or call (415) 835-4781.
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