So said director Mike Figgis when he landed in Los Angeles airport. This got him a five hour interrogation by Homeland Security.

I thought everyone in LA had a script for a movie or TV show sitting in their sock drawer, so how could the officers not know a pilot is a TV term. Besides, Figgis is white, without a generally non-white sounding name like Cat Stevens’ (Yousuf Islam), so I am surprised he got pulled aside at all.

 Update: Turns out the story is untrue (Boing Boing). Well, well, well. Now I almost wish the story was true, begging the pardon of Mr. Figgis.

I went to see Amu tonight. And I’m glad I did. It packed quite an emotional punch, and its take on the ‘84 riots (previous posts here and here) was a welcome corrective.

The usual trajectory of “genocide” movies takes it for granted that communal violence is something we possibly couldn’t understand. Its all supposed to be too brutal and confusing (e.g Earth(the movie), Hotel Rwanda etc.), based on ancient hatreds and religion. Amu takes a different tack, it unpeels the complexity of genocide as something that is planned and executed with precision, with some real goals in mind by its perpetrators. The film itself, though, manages to stay away from the perpetrators and concentrates instead on the people who are decent and the people who suffer. It leaves one surprisingly grief stricken.

As usual I am not surprised by the idiocy of the reviews. From the New York Times:

“Amu” wants to do many things at once: to find the personal in the political, to meld the two and to indict the Indian government. Ms. Bose, who also wrote the screenplay, isn’t yet a skilled enough filmmaker to weave these threads together seamlessly.

I guess all the decent reviewers like Manohla Dargis have gone to Cannes, so we are left with half-educated bimbos who can’t see beyond “identity politics” in a film with brown people in it. The Village Voice isn’t much better, so not even worth quoting here.

Anyway, it opened in New York City today, and I hope many more people will go to see it. Its crucial for an independent film to get a good audience in its first week, it can mean a wider release. So please go and support this film.

See Louis Proyect for another post on the film and the anti-Sikh riots.

Kerim often complains about how I am bad at posing for photographs and that is why there are more photos of our dog than me in his flickr sets. Here is his narrative about what he is talking about.

This was taken while on a hike in an old Tea estate outside Taipei.

I haven’t seen too much discussion about this on the blogs, I guess people get tired of getting hate mail from the SS (Saffron Sympathizers). I am assuming most people have heard of the arrest of MS University Art student, Chandra Mohan who seems to have simultaneously offended the self-appointed protectors of Hindu and Christian sentiments, with his MFA thesis paintings:

A group of VHP activists led by Niraj Jain, an advocate and a local VHP leader, barged into the university campus at around 3.30 pm on Wednesday, when the internal evaluation of the student works was being held. They allegedly manhandled Mohan and hurled abuses at the faculty members and other students.

They had tipped off the local police who were soon at the spot and took Mohan into custody, as he was ‘a threat to the secular atmosphere of Baroda’.

Yes, you heard right, the saffron shirts barge into a university examination, not open to the public, rough up people, and the victim gets arrested.

The dean, Shivji Panniker would like to file a complaint against the attack, instead he has been suspended by the vice chancellor of the university who apparently apologized to the attacker. The students have responded by arranging an exhibition of religious art, and the faculty has released a press release in support of Chandra Mohan and the dean.

The latest news is that Chandra Mohan has been denied bail, and the Rev Immanuel Kant (does the man know he shares his name with an Enlightenment philosopher?) is planning a rally to protest Chandra Mohan’s depiction of Jesus.

I haven’t found any images of the offending paintings, but MS University has one of the top Art departments in the country, and from what I have seen of the work of their students and faculty, its a well deserved reputation. So its hard for me to believe that the student’s work is simply crude and aimed at being offensive.
Still, I would be willing to accommodate Jain’s assessment that these paintings are offensive if I could actually believe that the man is a competent art critic. But given similar brouhahas in the past, I am not so sure. Remember the whole anti-Hussein protest last year? Here is an example of one of the paintings that was being protested. The caption on the web page says: Goddess Durga in the nude having sexual intercourse with a tiger. I looked at this picture for a long time and just couldn’t see it as such, a rather tired reference to Cubism, but intercourse? Nope. I guess you need to have a dirty mind to see it. (See the whole series and what is supposedly objectionable about them here)

Update: The Fine Arts faculty at MS University has a blog with updates and links.

2nd Update: Here is a video of the incident (via Chapati Mystery)