Please join us for an DocuClub/Arts Engine mixer in our courtyard prior to the screening at 7:00pm, with tasty treats available from Sweet Tooth of the Tiger. The screening will begin following this at 7:30pm.
Sita is a Hindu goddess, the leading lady of India’s epic the Ramayana and a dutiful wife who follows her husband Rama on a 14 year exile to a forest, only to be kidnapped by an evil king from Sri Lanka. Despite remaining faithful to her husband, Sita is put through many tests. Nina (the filmmaker Nina Paley herself) is an artist who finds parallels in Sita’s life when her husband – in India on a work project – decides to break up their marriage and dump her via email. Three hilarious Indonesian shadow puppets with Indian accents –
linking the popularity of the Ramayana from India all the way to the Far East – narrate both the ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the epic.
In her first feature length film, Paley juxtaposes multiple narrative and visual styles to create a highly entertaining yet moving vision of the Ramayana. Musical numbers choreographed to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw feature a cast of hundreds: flying monkeys, evil monsters, gods, goddesses, warriors, sages, and winged eyeballs. A tale of truth, justice and a woman’s cry for equal treatment. Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.” Paley has given audiences permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix movie through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.
This screening will be introduced by Felix Endara of DocuClub/Arts Engine. A post-screening discussion on the Sita’s funding and distribution strategy will be held by Karl Fogel with QuestionCopyright.org.
[qt:http://www.uniondocs.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/SitaTrailer2008H264_512kb.mp4 430 240]
Co-sponsored by:
Posted in: Past Events.
[...] Sita Sings the Blues never really feels like a documentary. It is not merely that the film is drawn rather than photographed, or that it is packed with unmotivated musical interludes. These tactics have all appeared in other films more convincingly categorized as documentary, but Nina Paley’s film is loosened from whatever strand ties those movies to a larger non-fiction ethic. It seems a disservice to the film itself, and to an expansive definition of documentary, to label it as such. [...]
[...] to see Sita Sings the Blues on the big screen at the IFC Center. UnionDocs recently had a great screening of Sita which brought up some interesting concerns about its classification as a [...]