Tahini and Tears and Love Mom will be screened as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival:

Tuesday, September 28, 2:00PM; 70 minutes; $10
AMC Theatres Empire 25, 234 West 42nd St., between 7th and 8th Ave
http://nymf.org/MovieRI.htm

The Movie Musical Screening Series runs September 27 – 30 at the AMC Theatres Empire 25, 234 West 42nd St., between 7th and 8th Ave. The New York Musical Theatre Festival runs September 13 – October 3, 2004. Additional information, scheduling and ticketing on both the Series and the Festival is available at www.nymf.org or at 212-352-3101.

Slate has a report on the conservative film festival in Dallas. It seems to have had the requisite Michael Moore bashing crop of films, and a hagiography of sorts on Ann Coulter:

…stranger still was Is It True What They Say About Ann?, a short film about the conservative provocateur Ann Coulter, who said of Muslim terrorists after 9/11 that we should “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” The director, Patrick Wright, never attempts to answer the title question, preferring to let the camera gaze lovingly at Ann as she hawks her books and invades university campuses. After a protester disrupts one of her speeches, she quips, “You really develop your analytical skills here at Johns Hopkins. At Harvard, they had questions.” When an olive-skinned girl asks her to sign a book later, Coulter asks, “Are you a Sikh?” No, I’m Hindu, the woman replies. “Oh, I’ve got a lot of Sikh friends for some reason,” Coulter says. “You’re my first Hindu.”

How does she know so many Sikhs? or does she know only one brown person who is also Sikh, kind of like how lots of people have that one gay friend or one African American friend, and tell you that to let you know that they are not bigoted.

Now if they have a retrospective of Leni Riefenstahl, I might go next year. She seems to be back in fashion. A friend told me of a dinner table conversation she had with some rich young woman who was very excited about starting an art collection. The first acquisitions she made were photographs and stills from Riefenstahl’s films, when my friend pointed out that Riefenstahl was a propagandist for the Nazi’s, she was greeted with a blank stare. I guess invoking the H guy is valid only when you want to go to war, and quite invalid when you want to increase the value of your property.

If you are in New York, and want to sample my neighborhood, come to this event.

Sunnyside Film Festival is a community-based Film&Video Show, free and open to anyone. Sunnyside Film Festival aims to build bridges between cultures by celebrating diversity of our neighborhood and connect our neighbors through artistic experience.
The 4th Annual Sunnyside Film Festival will be held
on Friday, September 17th
and Saturday, September 18th
at sunset, in Doughboy Park, Woodside
(54th Street between Skillman Ave. & 39th Dr.

Take the number 7 train to 52nd St.

Here is a map.

Our neighborhood DVD stores always have a sale on, and a staple in these sales are often films by Guru Dutt, which we have been slowly accumulating. Last week we saw Baaz (1953) the first film in which Guru Dutt directed and appeared in as a hero. While not a very good film, one can see the beginnings of what was to become the legend of Guru Dutt. I can still remember the thrill of watching Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962) when it was rereleased in our town at the old Orient Theatre (its been turned into a shopping plaza now). Guru Dutt will be put honored by the Government of India with a stamp. Rediff has a story.

Tahini and Tears will be part of the movie musical program at the festival, and on HUGE screen! Also screening will be a short I edited, “Love Mom,” by Ted Sperling, I will attend the Q&A after the screening if I can, hopefully some of my colleagues will be there.

Tuesday, September 28, 2:00PM; 70 minutes; $10
AMC Theatres Empire 25, 234 West 42nd St., between 7th and 8th Ave

Information
Tickets

Hundreds of eunuchs gathered in Bhopal on Thursday to celebrate the annual “kajaria” festival to mark the climax of the monsoon. Playing loud music, making suggestive gestures and exchanging bawdy jokes with bystanders, they moved through all of old Bhopal to pray for mankind at the ancient Gupha mandir (cave temple).

I hadn’t heard of the Kajaria festival before, being more familiar with the festival in Koovagam, a small village in Tamil Nadu, unlike celebrating the monsoon this important festival for Hijras commemorates an event from the Mahabharata:

Also in attendance are the dangas, men who “become” women for the duration of the festival. The rest of the year, the dangas are husbands or single men. But during the Chittirai-Pournami festival, they wear saris, elaborate wigs, and bright plastic jewelry.

The origins of this festival can be traced to a Hindu tale in which Aravan, a man about to be sacrificed to the gods, asked to be married before dying. To fulfill this last wish, the god Krishna is said to have assumed the form of a beautiful woman and married Aravan.

A really great post by Amardeep Singh on the reviews of Vanity Fair. That is all I have to say, go read it.

Via Sepia Mutiny, the BBC reports that Janaki, a hijra was denied insurance coverage because she didn’t fit into the gender box of ‘M’ or ‘F.’

One of my jobs has been to work on a documentary about transgendered prostitutes in the US. Interestingly this little box is what they complain about as well. This little box in forms is what forces many of them to get a sex-change operation even if they are ambiguous about the decision. Many of the subjects in the film talked about losing their jobs because of how their appearance changed as they started experimenting with their identity, which forced them into prostitution, and how they were hoping to get a sex change operation so that they could check the right box and get jobs. Many of the subjects wanted to dress like women, have breasts, be addressed as “she” but didn’t necessarily want their sex organs changed, and it created many legal hurdles for them, among other things. There is a website devoted to providing support for people who do not want to belong to the either/or gender category, if you are interested in knowing what problems people face with alternate sexualities.

People seem to have a really difficult time with the idea of a third gender, as I have come to realize, even with my little film. Usually a stunned silence greets my film and people are either horrified and afraid to say so, or enjoy the film and are afraid to say so. Either way it doesn’t seem its PC for them to say how they feel, though I did get hate mail from a non-eunuch who felt I was homophobic and xenophobic, odd considering the film is made by a “foreigner.” I asked her to clarify, she hasn’t replied yet.

The BBC reports

The high court in the Indian capital Delhi has dismissed a legal petition that sought to legalise homosexuality.

Basically they are refusing to repeal an antiquated law from the late 19th century that criminalizes homosexuality, all on the basis of a technicality, it seems the “wrong group” petitioned. According to a Professor Rao

It’s about time the government woke up from its slumber and caught up with its reading. Far from being a western import, homosexuality was known and practised in ancient and medieval India unselfconsciously. The Kamasutra takes note of it. In their book Same Sex Love in India, Saleem Kidwai and Ruth Vanita inform us that Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva had a love affair, that led to the birth of Ayyappa.

It seems that Sanskrit has words that describe several kinds of sexualities not just homo and hetero, so it seems there is nothing “un-Indian” about alternate sexualities. So something that has been criminalized for only two hundred years or so takes on the mantle of tradition, while the VHP agitates to bring “Ram Rajya.” Its troubling that both Prof. Rao and myself feel compelled to invoke an ancient tradition to criticize a law that is clearly unjust, and should be repealed for that reason alone. How the terms of the debate have changed….

This via Engadget. If you are in India and don’t pay your cell phone bill, the company just might call your relatives and friends, and not you, to get you to pay the bill. And its not even illegal! I guess they are using the old shame and tell technique, “Log kya kahenge” (what will people say when they hear of this), since the guilt stuff doesn’t quite work the same way in India. Can you imagine the sort of trouble you could get into if you are a randy teenager? Webindia reports

“The use of mobile phones is directly responsible for the early sexual encounters directly, they are as harmful as porn sites and adult magazines,” said Professor Willy Pederson.

So in a country where cell phones look like they will overtake land lines pretty soon, with its insalubrious effects on teenagers, I can only imagine the chaos that would follow. On a more mundane level, if you are on the National Do Not Call Registry, and are wondering why your telemarketing calls have gone up recently, its because the telemarketer is probably calling from India, and they are not breaking any US federal laws. In a country where privacy is not greatly respected, there is not even a god I can pray to for protection from unwanted calls.