If you, too, are watching the 8oth Annual Academy Awards, you might have noticed that one of the first people thanked in an acceptance speech was a Desi. The inaugural Oscar of the night went to Alexandra Byrne, who was nominated for Best Costume Design. Byrne won for her work in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which is why she said “Thank you, Shekhar” during her brief, graceful remarks.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is the Academy Award-winning 2007 film sequel to the film Elizabeth. It stars Cate Blanchett and is based on events during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Written by William Nicholson and Michael Hirst and produced by Working Title Films, The Golden Age is directed by Shekhar Kapur. The film has music composed by Craig Armstrong and A. R. Rahman. [wiki]

You may not have caught it, because she said “SHAKer”. I almost didn’t catch it, because I was still swooning over presenter Jennifer Garner’s flawless gown and dimples (I’m a sucker for dimples). The only reason I snapped out of my reverie is because of my crack training here in the bunker, which has given my kundi magical abilities to notice potentially bloggable topics (see what I did there? HA!).

Four years of recording the minutiae of brown everything have passed, but I still perk up and think, “hey!” when I recognize something Sepia, especially when I do so during a program I am watching for the dresses…speaking of which, it’s time for me to get back to the show…SHAKer’s star, Cate Blanchett is taking the stage… Continue reading →

Last week Anna posted about some “controversial” statements made by a British politician with regards to inbreeding within the British Asian (i.e. Muslim) community. Specifically cited was the practice of marrying one’s first cousin. Coincidentally, a friend of mine from L.A. (Amyn Kaderali) has just finished a movie (awaiting distribution) titled “Kissing Cousins.” It is not a documentary but rather a “Relatively Romantic” comedy that tries to make the audience feel just a bit uncomfortable. Here is the trailer:

Amir is the last bachelor in his group of coupled-up friends. When they accuse him of being incapable of having a relationship and replace him as the best man at an upcoming wedding, Amir and his visiting long-lost cousin hatch a plan to prove them wrong. [Link]

Among the cast of actors is the gorgeous Rebecca Hazelwood as the hot cousin, Gerry Bednob, David Alan Grier, and…Urkel (sorry, Jaleel White…respect). Amyn also previously released the short film Call Center. Keep an eye out for Kissing Cousins at upcoming film festivals and let SM readers know how it is.

Continue reading →

Via Chapati Mystery, a fifteen minute short film called “The Little Terrorist,” which was nominated for an Oscar for best short in 2005. If you have fifteen minutes, you can watch it here (the first 30 seconds or so are black; be patient):

The video appears to have been posted by the production company itself, so you can watch in good conscience. According to the film’s website, it was filmed on location in a rural village in Rajasthan on a shoe-string budget.

Also, you may want to go straight to Video.google.com to view it on a slightly larger screen (especially if you want to read the subtitles).

One minor question to consider might be: what dialect are the villagers speaking? Would we simply call it “Rajasthani”? Continue reading →

In the past, I was somewhat snarky when it came out that Aishwarya Rai, before her marriage to Abhishek Bachchan, agreed to marry a Peepul tree because of her “Manglik” status.

The New York Times had a story recently (thanks, Jamie), which described how Aishwarya Bachchan recently dropped out of a Hollywood project with Will Smith in order to be home in Mumbai to celebrate Karva Chauth.

For those who don’t know, Karva Chauth is a traditional Hindu festival where wives fast for a whole day without food or water as a symbol of their devotion to their husbands. I have many women friends who object to the festival as regressive, though I also know one or two people who do observe it out of a sense of loyalty to tradition. (Perhaps not too surprisingly, the women I know who observe it are NRIs, not ABDs. Are there any ABDs out there who observe Karva Chauth?)

Here is the quote the NYT gives regarding Aish’s decision to return to Mumbai for Karva Chauth:

Ultimately Ms. Bachchan chose to return to Mumbai and starve with a smile. National television channels covered her first Karva Chauth as headline news. Two months later she shrugged off her loss in an interview. “You do what you have to do,” she said. “Feeling torn and thereby unhappy, confused or guilty is not something I want to feel. So you make your choices and go with it. You get some and some you don’t.” (link)

What to say. From what I can tell, everything Aish does outside of her acting seems to reflect a pretty sincere traditionalism. One has to presume she’s observing Karva Chauth because she really wants to, not because anyone put pressure on her to do so. So, if we accept that the festival of Karva Chauth isn’t inherently sexist (and the case can be made that it is), here I’m inclined to give props to Aish for putting tradition over her career. It certainly beats America’s celebrity culture — which has lately just been depressingly bad, what with Britney losing her mind, and Amy Winehouse smoking crack…

On the other hand, the Indian media loves this kind of thing, so it may be that sacrificing a romantic comedy with Will Smith might actually help her Bollywood career — and she can have both. Jodhaa Akbar, anyone? Continue reading →

I enjoyed looking at some of the influences behind The Namesake last week, and I’ve started to look at some of Mira Nair’s older films — including one that I hadn’t seen before, The Perez Family.

The Perez Family is a film adaptation of a novel by the same name by Christine Bell. It’s the story of a family separated at the time of the Cuban revolution, which has the potential to be reunited because of the Mariel boatlift of 1980. The boatlift brought more than 100,000 Cuban refugees to the United States, with full approval of both Castro and the U.S. government.

My detailed (possibly too detailed?) take on the film is below the fold, but at this point one obvious issue for discussion does come up, which is whether there are points for comparison between Cuban refugees and Indian immigrants from the 1960s and 70s. Cuban Americans are famous for skewing somewhat to the Right; many of the earlier wave were wealthy landowners in Cuba, who had the most to lose in Castro’s Cuba. But perhaps many earlier Indian immigrants are themselves somewhat more conservative than one might expect, perhaps because of the “artifact” of U.S. immigration law up through 1980 — which made it relatively easy for doctors and engineers to come in. Continue reading →

I’ve been watching Mira Nair’s Director’s Commentary on The Namesake DVD, and it’s been surprising to see how much of the film was inspired by other film directors and visual artists’ work. This was a film I liked quite a bit when I first saw it, and it had the unusual distinction of being a film my parents also liked. (I also liked the book, though I know from earlier discussions that a fair number of readers did not.) Watching the Director’s Commentary I realize there was a great deal in Nair’s film I had missed earlier.

Despite the immense amount of craft that went into the making of the film and the strong performances by Irfan Khan and Tabu, I doubt that The Namesake will get much attention come Oscar time. Why not is an endless question; one might point out that the Oscars don’t really award the year’s “best” films so much as the films the major studios feel are at once somewhat “serious” and “commercially viable.”

Still, the nice thing about writing for a blog is, you can pay tribute to the films that caught your attention from a given year, even if no one else agrees with you. (Readers, what desi-related films — produced in India or elsewhere — stood out to you from 2007?)

In the post below, I explore some names from among the large array of people who inspired Nair and collaborated with her as she put together the visual and aural elements of the film. The artists are both Desi (mostly Bengali) and American, though it’s really the former group that leaves the biggest impact on the film.

I hope you enjoy the links below as much as I did assembling them; they make for quite an art history lesson! Continue reading →

I recently got a chance to see an excellent documentary called I For India (thanks, Kate!). It’s a kind of family documentary that spans nearly forty years. When Yash Suri moved to England, in 1965, he decided to buy two Super 8 film cameras, two tape recorders, and two projectors. One set he kept, the other he sent to his family in Meerut. He filmed and recorded his family’s life and growth through the 1970s and 80s, his family in India did the same — and they sent each other the tapes, as a way of staying in touch. The result is an amazing archive of what happens to a family when one part of it goes abroad. Yash’s daughter Sandhya Suri assembled and edited the material into a unique 70 minute statement. Here is a brief clip:

(You can also supposedly see a clip from the film at the BBC, though when I tried it I couldn’t get the video to play.) Continue reading →