A South African film titled, “Surf and Bhoondi” has just won the 2004 Hartley-Merrill National Screenwriting Prize here in the U.S. From iAfrica.com:

‘Surf and Bhoondi’ tells how a young Indian girl has to overcome family pressure and fight racism at the hands of white surfers in order to ride the waves. Set in South Africa, the film deals with issues of change within the one-million-strong Indian community and their relationship with other communities.

It also looks at the bond between father and daughter and how that has also changed for modern Indian families. In public the father is puts on the face of a modern liberal man in the new South Africa, while at home he struggles to maintain his orthodox values.

Sounds very Whale Rider-ish. I hope to check it out.

You guys probably know or can guess that I travel quite a bit for work. When you’re the lonely business traveller, you end up spending a fair number of your jetlagged hours channel surfing the local TV. In between dubbed reruns of TJ Hooker in various languages, one ofthe things that’s surprising me more and more is how much Desi culture I’m running into in random countries.

I was impressed, for ex., with the Desi quarter of Singapore (one of the cleanest cities in the world, and yet, Desi’s have managed to make an entire street smell like Garam Masala ;-). But I think most folks generally expect to see (and smell?) the Desi presence there.

The spate of more surprising examples began about a year ago when I was in Stockholm and flipped out when I saw the video for Mundian To Bach Ke on Swede MTV.

A little over a month ago, I was in Amsterdam and Russell Peters was on TV (with Dutch subtitles). He appeared to be delivering his usual desi-themed material to a UK audience and the show was rebroadcast on a local TV station.

And now, I’m in Sao Paolo, Brazil and just a few minutes ago, a total 3rd tier ABCD movie – Bollywood/Hollywood was on the boob-tube complete with Portugese subtitles. The movie still sucked but it was sorta interesting to see a Brazilian announcer say something about the flick afterwards with a headshot of Lisa Ray in the corner of the screen.

Jason Alexander must be really really desperate. He acted in a completely unfunny (by any standard) sketch called “Outsource This!” It’s a video clip on the whiny Outsource Outrage website.

It plays to all sorts of nasty, parochial predjudices by saying the names of foreign countries like they’re nasty, just because they’re not in America (at one point a kid asks him where Uzbekistan is, and he points to a map, and says it’s not in “here” gesturing to North America). Another time he gestures to Iran and North Korea, waving his hands over the intervening countries, saying “Axis of Evil,” like all of Asia is inside the Axis.

The only good thing about the clip is that they don’t single out India. Watch it, be prepared to be both bored and repulsed.

Aishwarya Rai’s star rose over Britannia last weekend as Bride and Prejudice premiered at #1 in the UK (thanks, Ennis). The film, directed by Gurinder Chadha, sold £1.67M ($3M) in tickets and topped Saw, Wimbledon and Resident Evil 2.

Adjusted for population, that’s the equivalent of a $15M U.S. opening, pretty decent since the UK film industry doesn’t produce many blockbusters. The UK’s most successful opening of all time, Bridget Jones’ Diary, did £5.7M ($10.2M) its first weekend, or the equivalent of $51M in population-adjusted dollars.

Rai follows in the illustrious desi footsteps of Queen and curry as the UK’s most popular. The film opens in the U.S. in limited release on Christmas Eve.

is the first English-language Bollywood musical to succeed in a mainstream market, Lagaan (Rs. 375M in India) and Monsoon Wedding ($30M worldwide) notwithstanding. The UK audience was probably drawn by its affection for Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham. It’s been a year of crossover firsts: the first desi Broadway musical, the first Indian-American Olympic medalist, and now the film.

Previous posts on Bride and Prejudice: 1, 2. Also see newly-released film clips, the reviews, and the trailer.

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Anjali from over at to the teeth has utilized the Sepia Mutiny Tip Line and alerted the Mutineers to some interesting information out of India (you can read her take on the site). As reported at CommonDreams.org:

Film activists in the Indian capital have strongly protested the country’s censors holding up release of the award-winning documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11”.

“Fahrenheit 9/11”, vehemently anti-US President George W. Bush, won the Palme Ór best film award at Cannes this year. It can be downloaded off the Net and its pirated copies are available across the country.

“The censor board takes these senseless decisions because as a body it is irrelevant and completely behind times,” said Shuddhabrata Sengupta at Sarai, the media and research foundation.

“The censor board itself should be done away with,” Sengupta, a researcher on issues of censorship, told IANS.

The Michael Moore film, which has become a pillar of the Democratic presidential campaign, was supposed to be released in Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Pune on Oct 15.

But what in the movie could possibly offend Indian censors? India isn’t part of the coalition of the bribed an coerced that Moore makes fun of in the movie. Then what?

Several reasons are being offered on why the censors are worried about the film. One of them is to avoid offending the American authorities.

We wouldn’t want that. I for one think that the censors are simply trying to suppress the film because they found out from the Detroit Free Press that Moore is a criminal.

“The National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford has put together an exhibition of film posters to mark ten years of its Bite the Mango film festival, including Aan (Savage Princess) from 1952.” [BBC]

According to family history, my grandfather was a co-owner of the only 4 color printing press in Delhi after Independence. It was across the street from Jama Masjid, and is still in operation (I’ve been to see it). My father has fond memories of all the posters he collected as a child, and reflects that they would have been worth a pretty penny had he managed to keep them.