Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Friday, April 18, 2008

Posted 4:51 PM by Anurag

Apr 18/19: April Screenings by Vikalp Bengaluru

"In the month of April, VIKALP BENGALURU presents 5 films that explore ideas of sexuality.

April 18 and 19 at 6.30 pm

Nani Cinematheque, Centre for Film and Drama 5th floor, Sona Towers, 71 Millers Road, Bangalore 560052

Entrance for members only. Please bring your membership cards. If you are not a member, please come to the venue half an hour before the screening and register. For more information, please visit: www.vikalpblr.org

SCHEDULE:

April 18, 6.30pm

Kaun Mille Dekho Kissko Director: NAMITA MALHOTRA India, 2007, 16 minutes

The filmmaker will be present for the screening.

About Elsewhere Director: PRIYA SEN India, 2007, 29 minutes

Cashback Director: SEAN ELLIS UK, 2004,18 minutes

Sea in the Blood Director: RICHARD FUNG Canada, 2000, 26 minutes

April 19, 6.30pm

Our Family Dir: ANJALI MONTEIRO and K P JAYSANKAR India, 2007, 56 minutes

The filmmakers will be present for the screening.

Synopses:

Kaun mille dekho kissko (the merry gay round of luv) This is a short film made from clips of the mainstream Bollywood hit film Kal Ho Na Ho. The film subverts the narrative of the heterosexual triangle to tell the story of queer love and desire, and explores the accidental slippages in popular cinema that allow for the narrative of a gay love story between two male characters.

About Elsewhere About Elsewhere is a film that seeks to foreground the impossibility of fixing notions of sexuality through ideas of "identity" and "language". As the film moves through various worlds the filmmaker has inhabited, it suggests a self in constant formation; one that constructs itself from parts and places that are in themselves, fragments of memory and experience. The film uses the metaphor of a "shell" as a place of repose and withdrawal from which it is possible to emerge. Uniquely, and with all the flair and multiplicity that accompanies a way of being.

Cashback Ben Willis is an art student who works the night shift several times a week at the Whitechapel Sainsbury's. He's clear about the arrangement: he trades his time for money - cashback, as he calls it. We meet his co-workers, Sharon, Barry, and Matt, and their supervisor, Jenkins. Ben's colleagues are good at wasting time, but Ben talks to us about how he makes his shift go faster: by imagining that time has stopped. We see this late-night world of drudgery through Ben's eyes, as time does indeed stop, and he can get out his sketch book.

Sea in the Blood A personal documentary about living with illness, tracing the relationship of the artist to thalassemia in his sister, Nan, and AIDS in his partner, Tim. The narrative of love and loss is set against a background of colonialism in the Caribbean and the reverberations of migration and political change.

Our Family What does it mean to cross that line which sharply divides us on the basis of gender? To free oneself of the socially constructed onus of being male? Is there life beyond a hetero-normative family?

Set in Tamilnadu, India, 'Our Family' brings together excerpts from Nirvanam, a one-person performance, by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and a family of three generations of trans-gendered female subjects. Aasha, Seetha and Dhana, who are bound together by ties of adoption, belong to the community called Aravanis (aka Hijras, in some parts of India). Aasha Bharathi, the grandmother, is the president of the Tamilnadu Aravanigal Association, Chennai. Seetha, the daughter lives with her male partner Selvam, in Coimbatore. Dhana, Seetha's adopted daughter also lives with her and shuttles between her adopted and her natal families.

The film juxtaposes the 'normality' of their existence with the dark and powerful narrative by Pritham- 'Nirvanam'; Nirvanam (Liberation) refers to the act of liberating oneself from the male body and transforming oneself to a female. This narrative bears witness to the tumultuous journey towards a reinvented selfhood, a journey fraught with violence, exploitation, affection and courage. The pains, pleasures and dilemmas of becoming the 'other' is the motif of the film. Weaving together performance, life histories and everyday life, it problematises the divides between 'us' and 'them'.

For more information, please log on to http://ourfamily2007.wordpress.com "

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