[Reader-list] 4/20-4/22: Emergencies and Emergencies: New South Asian Film-Making From Britain

[SS Sandhu]

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Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University presents:

South Asian Underground Film Festival
4/20-4/22: EMERGENCES AND EMERGENCIES: NEW SOUTH ASIAN FILM-MAKING FROM BRITAIN

Featuring: "My Son the Fanatic", "Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music", "India Calling", "The Road to Guantanamo", "Bradford Riots", "Otolith", "England Expects" and more...

Post screening discussions w/ Hanif Kureishi, Vivek Bald, Steve Savale, Vivien Goldman

Lately there has been an explosion in the number of films starring, written or directed by British South Asians.  Moving beyond staid coming-of-age stories, arranged-marriage melodramas or middle-of-the-road comedy, a new generation of Asian artists is producing a wealth of bold, experimental, dynamic works – spanning genres as diverse as spaghetti Western and political sci fi – that explore, with humour, sass and fiery intellect – a post-9/11, post-7/7 political landscape in which the nation’s formerly most-wanted minority group is now seen as a hotbed of cultural refuseniks and nascent terrorists.  

This season brings to New York, for the first time in many cases, an exciting cross-section of these feature films, documentaries and video-art works. There will be a number of Q&As, including one with Hanif Kureishi, and a live video-link up with Ruhal Ahmed, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee.  A catalogue, featuring newly-commissioned essays by the likes of Mohsin Hamid, Amitava Kumar, Vijay Prashad and Kamila Shamsie, will also be available during the festival.  

Friday-Sunday - April 20-22
Cantor Film Center
36 E. 8th St. @ University Pl.
Subway: A, C, E, B, D, F, V to West 4th St.
N, R, W to 8th St., 6 to Astor Place

First come/first serve. Doors open 15 minutes before screening.

Visit http://www.nyu-apastudies.org/event.php?type=1_event&event_id=194
for more information.



FRIDAY, APRIL 20
7pm-10pm 
"MY SON THE FANATIC" - Featuring a Q&A with Hanif Kureishi
Join Hanif Kureishi, internationally-renowned author (THE BUDDHA OF SURBURBIA), Oscar-nominated screenwriter (MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDERETTE), and playwright for a special screening of this prescient 1997 drama. Om Puri stars as a Pakistani taxi driver who enters into a passionate relationship with a Northern prostitute much to the disgust of his increasingly fundamentalist son.

Screening Co-Sponsored by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, The Maurice Kanbar Institute

SATURDAY, APRIL 21
2pm - "BRADFORD RIOTS” (2006, dir. Neil Biswas) and "YOUNG, ANGRY AND MUSLIM" (2005, dir. Julian Hendy) Discussion with Steve Savale from Asian Dub Foundation
 
5pm - "THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO” (2004, dir. Michael Winterbottom)
 
8pm - "A LOVE SUPREME" (2001, dir. Nilesh Patel) and "THE WARRIOR" (2001, dir. Asif Kapadia)
 
SUNDAY, APRIL 22
2pm - "INDIA CALLING" (2002, dir. Sonali Fernando) and "OTOLITH" (2003, dir. The Otolith Group)" (2003)
 
5pm - "ENGLAND EXPECTS" (2004, dir. Tony Smith)
 
8pm - 10pm
"MUTINY: ASIANS STORM BRITISH MUSIC" (2003, dir. Vivek Bald) and "SKIN DEEP" (2001, dir. Yousaf Ali Khan)
Special post-screening discussion with ADF's Steve Savale and Mutiny director Vivek Bald, moderated by renowned music journalist and punk professor Vivien Goldman

10pm – FESTIVAL AFTERPARTY
Join the filmmakers and festival goers at the festival afterparty.  Location: Leela Lounge, One West 3rd Street at Broadway. Featuring new and classic music by the artists profiled in Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music.

All seating is first come/first serve. Doors open 15 minutes before screening.

"Emergences and Emergencies" is co-sponsored by NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, The Maurice Kanbar Institute, The Directors Series, NYU Center for Media, Culture and History and Center for Media and Religion, 3rd-I NY, Asian Cinevision, Imaginasian Theater, Leela Lounge.

ABOUT THE FILMS

A LOVE SUPREME (2001, dir. Nilesh Patel), 9 min
Nilesh Patel's debut film is a beautifully shot and multi-award-winning audio-visual essay on the preparation of samosas by his mother.  Influenced, unexpectedly, by sequences in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, it makes the daily dishes cooked by Asian mothers resemble exquisite art installations.

BRADFORD RIOTS (2006, dir. Neil Biswas), 75 min
The July 2001 riots in the Northern city of Bradford were the most violent to hit the United kingdom in over two decades.  191 men, most of them locally-born Pakistani Muslims, were jailed for a total of more than 500 years.  Neil Biswas's meticulously researched drama goes beyond the tabloid headlines to present a fascinating portrait, influenced visually by La Haine and The Battle of Algiers, and scored by Asian Dub Foundation, of an immigrant community riven by religious and generational tension.  

ENGLAND EXPECTS (2004, dir. Tony Smith), 124 min
The New York premiere of this controversial and no-holds-barred drama about a responsible family man, living in the shadow of London's financial district, whose life falls apart after he develops a sexual obsession with a trader at the investment bank where he works as a security guard.  His meltdown, of a ferocity that recalls both Taxi Driver and the work of the late Alan Clarke, brings him into violent conflict with local Bangladeshis.  As powerful and incisive a post-9/11 film as has yet been made. 

INDIA CALLING (2002, dir. Sonali Fernando), 50 min
The first and still the best documentary about the modern-day call centre, this is a deliciously ironic portrait of a David Brett-style Australian boss who has arrived in Delhi to effect a self-proclaimed revolution in the working practices of twenty-something Indian graduates.  Acclaimed film-maker Fernando ensures that the black comedy is leavened with a probing and deeply empathetic study of the yearning, aspirational call agents themselves.

MUTINY: ASIANS STORM BRITISH MUSIC (2003, dir. Vivek Bald), 77 min
Combining music documentary and social documentary, Mutiny charts the meteoric rise of South Asian music in 1990s Britain, as well as the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Shot independently on digital video over the course of seven years, Mutiny features Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, Talvin Singh, Fun^Da^Mental, DJ Ritu and a host of other British musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent, presenting these artists and their music with depth, intimacy, and intensity. Rarely screened in New York since its completion in 2003, this is a film not to be missed.

MY SON THE FANATIC (1998, dir. Udayan Prasad), 87 min
Hanif Kureishi adapted this remarkably prophetic film from a short story he originally wrote for The New Yorker.  Set in Bradford, it centres on a Pakistani taxi driver (Om Puri) whose respect and love for most things English - including a local prostitute (Rachel Griffiths) - brings him into terrible conflict with his increasingly fundamentalist son who regards his family's adopted northern English city as irredeemably decadent.  Movingly acted and expressionistically filmed, this is an affecting romance rich in political and psychological insights.

OTOLITH (2003, dir. The Otolith Group), 22 min
Influenced by the work of Chris Marker and the Black Audio Film  Collective, and with stunning sound design from the latter's Trevor  Matthison, Otolith is an eerie cinematic essay that doubles as a rare  example of post-colonial science fiction.  Moving between the zero- gravity astronaut-training centre at Star City and the two-million- protestor-strong anti-war protests in London in early 2003, it's a meditation on utopianism, Third World socialism and the nature of colonialism's visual archive.

THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO (2004, dir. Michael Winterbottom), 95 min
Winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival,  this is the true story of three British Muslims, subsequently known as  the 'Tipton Three', who traveled to Pakistan to attend a wedding, only  to end up being held for two years without charges in the American  military prison at Guantanamo Bay.  Shot in Winterbottom's characteristic part-dramatic, part-documentary style, it has been  described by the New York Times as a "film of staggering force".

SKIN DEEP (2001, dir. Yousaf Ali Khan), 13 min
Set in deprived, inner-city England during the 1970s, Skin Deep is a brutal and haunting portrait of Romo, a half-English, half-Pakistani teenager who tries to pass for white.  Things come to a crisis one night when his new-found skinhead friends tell him to attack another Asian kid.  This unforgettable exploration of Asian abjection won Salford, Manchester-born Khan a nomination at the UK BAFTA awards in 2002.

THE WARRIOR (2001, dir. Asif Kapadia), 82 min
Kapadia's debut feature is a ravishing Western in which the drama has been relocated to the deserts of feudal Rajasthan.  Irfan Khan plays a bloodythirsty warlord's henchman who decides to lay down arms.  In consequence, his only son is killed.  He finds himself travelling deeper and deeper into a wilderness that is both geographic and spiritual.  Magisterial in pace and sweep, this fully deserves the Comparisons to Kurosawa and Leone that enthusiastic international critics have been making since its release.

YOUNG, ANGRY AND MUSLIM (2005, dir. Julian Hendy), 48 min
In the wake of the London Underground bombings in July 2005, Navid  Akhtar, a British Pakistani Muslim, journeys across the country to  explore the tensions and alienation within his community and asks how this has contributed to the terror attacks.  As part of his passionate and very personal documentary, Akhtar also returns to his parents' Kashmiri village and agonises over whether to sell the land he has inherited from his recently deceased father.