I have a couple of pieces playing at the Museo Nacional de Arte and CENART in Mexico City, as part of the the Transitio_MX Festival of Electronic and Video Arts. The festival goes from Sept. 30 through Oct. 9.

The Transitio_MX Festival of Electronic and Video Arts is the only event of its kind in Mexico. This year, our main theme explores the notion of technology as affection: How does technology affect us? How does it intervene in aesthetic activities? This festival is open to all those who are interested in digital culture and creative production via electronic media: videoart, netart, installations, composition, and similar endeavors.

My work will be part of this very cool show in Istanbul called Mind The Gap. If you happen to be in Turkey next week, or have friends there, pass the information along.

Here is more information about the show and organizers:

MIND THE GAP is a multi-platform arts initiative created by artist Alexia Mellor and co-organized with Michelle Dunn. Mellor formed the concept in order to create an accessible, global forum for emerging contemporary artists and thinkers to discuss, challenge, and connect new ideas. MTG is taking place in Istanbul, Turkey from September 13-15, 2011 and headquartered at IMC5533 in the Istanbul Textile Traders Market.

MIND THE GAP playfully alludes to transportation, but also references borders and gaps of all kinds: geographic, social, and economic. These events are aimed at engaging discussions of how emerging artists from around the globe are addressing issues of geographic and social borders, technological borders, and socioeconomic gaps.

MIND THE GAP asks the following questions:

In the face of global economic and environmental crises, what options do we have for a new vision?
What does nationality mean in a homogenized world in which multinational chain corporations are on every street corner in every corner of the globe?
How have our definitions of place been altered by the technologies we use every day?
MIND THE GAP is a featured panel at ISEA 2011 at Sabanci University in Istanbul, September 18, 2011.

Whose Children Are These? provides a gripping view into the lives of three Muslim teenagers impacted by anti-terrorism national security measures. One such program, “Special Registration,” required male non-citizens, as young as 16 from 25 predominately Arab and Muslim nations, to register with the US Government and resulted in the discriminatory deportation of nearly 14,000 men.

The film introduces Navila, an honors student who fought to have her father released from detention; Sarfaraz, a popular basketball player who confronts pending deportation; and Hager, a young woman who faces bias and is spurred into activism as a result.

I edited this award winning doc which has won seven awards and still counting. It got finishing funds from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, and is now being offered to Public broadcasting affiliates at the end of August. It needs letters of support in order to be programmed. So if you are in the US, please write to your local PBS station by clicking on the following link:

http://www.whosechildrenarethese.com/outreach.html

And forward the information to your friends and networks. Hopefully lots of people will get a chance to see this important documentary.

My copy of Anupama Chopra’s King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema finally arrived from the village post office. Amardeep has a great review and Filmiholic has a group interview with the author. Culled from thirty hours of interviews with Shah Rukh and interviews with eighty other people, the book is a very readable account of Shah Rukh’s rise to stardom. I particularly enjoyed the skill with which Anupama Chopra works in the history of the Hindi film industry and how it functions in order to allow for the SRK phenomenon. As she says:

I hope that I’ve managed to create a picture of Bollywood with Shah Rukh in the foreground and many, many other things in the background. The ambition was to create a window to a superstar’s life, Bollywood and India.

It keeps the book from becoming a hagiography, despite the obvious affection the author feels for her subject.

The book briefly mentions the year Shah Rukh spent as a student at the Mass Communication Research Center, in Jamia Millia Islamia, where he was a class mate of mine. This is one of those things that gives me mucho cool points with my nieces and nephews. Unfortunately he was not allowed to continue in the Masters program because of low attendance. In that year we were in the same project groups, and even then Shah Rukh was very charismatic and completely confident about his success. The boys in my class all made fun of his acting ability and looks, I guess all those jokes have backfired, big time.

One of my most vivid memories is of a time when we had just started in the Masters program, we were sitting on the lawn, while the other students were milling about, Shah Rukh looked at each of our classmates and with great accuracy described what everybody’s greatest fears and hopes were. Years later, I think of that conversation as being uncannily prescient. Shah Rukh was extremely intelligent and could read people with a frightening accuracy. I suppose that is one his greatest skills, the ability to recognize who a person is and how to negotiate with them.

The book’s account of his life while being vivid and detailed is very aligned to the persona of its subject, almost unconsciously so. I very clearly remember Shah Rukh talking about going to Bombay to do mainstream films, it wasn’t some after thought subsequent to doing “high-brow” theatre (was English theatre in Delhi high-brow is for another blog post) but perhaps Fellini like, the biographical narrative has acquired its own life. Certainly, his sense of himself as a movie star was pretty well formed even back then. Recently a friend reminded me how we were recruited to pass notes in History textbooks to his then girl friend, Gauri. Oh yes, it was all very filmy, and I was never certain how much of his persona was really him, and how much an image he had cultivated so vigorously that it became him. But no matter what, Shah Rukh was one of the nicest people in my class, and quite different from a lot of the boys who delighted in telling the women that they were stupid and incompetent. Not that he wasn’t sexist. I distinctly remember him telling me he didn’t want to work with Mira Nair because he thought he couldn’t learn anything from a woman director. Who knows what was behind that, but there it is. And oh yes, Pradeep Krishen and Arundhati Roy annoyed him exceedingly, and not just because of the role he didn’t get in Annie…but now I am descending into gossip, so I will stop.

Ingmar Bergman is dead. The Guardian has a lengthy obituary.

Two Boots Theatre in the East Village has a screening of Out of Status, a documentary about the on the treatment of Muslim immigrants after 9/11; it follows four families whose lives changed after immigration laws were selectively enforced. (August 1-7)

Today I watched the documentary Mingus: Charlie Mingus at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it was part of the Afro Punk program. Ah! the pleasures of watching old fashioned direct cinema documentaries. No frantic editing and extensive producing, forcing the film to tell a “story” that feeds you every little detail so that you don’t actually have to do any work on your own. The film was shot the night before Mingus was being evicted from his studio in the late 60s, interspersed with concert footage shot in jazz clubs. Mingus holds forth on race, history, landlords, plays with his five year old daughter, plays the piano, shoots a gun, and the film is content to let him be. For some reason I imagined Mingus would be grumpy, and in a bad mood, so I was taken aback at the casual brilliance and charisma of the man. And he was funny. His oath of allegiance to the flag is not be missed.

One of the great perks of being a filmmaker is that I can hang out with people doing really interesting things, and its considered work!

Last week, a screenwriter friend and I spent the afternoon with Ken Perlin, a professor in the Computer Science department at NYU who originated some of the algorithms that ended up creating the special effects in Tron! and his research has ended up in movie effects too many to enumerate, not to mention video games.

Ken showed us his latest research, which was the creation of virtual actors who performed ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as the 30 second version was narrated!

Another one of his experiments Rudolph, has its own poem:

Rudolph the red nosed rein-sheep†

Rudolph the red nosed rein-sheep
Had to stand on just three feet
This made his A.I. program
Always run NP-complete

All of the other rein-sheep
Used to call him names and laugh
They always said poor Rudolph
Had an asymmetric graph!

Asymmetric graph, wow, thats funny! Check out Ken’s page, its got all sorts of fun stuff to play with.

I had friend visiting me the other day. It was one of those balmy days when you can sit around all day chatting about this and that, and one of those aimless conversations involved the places we’d like to visit someday, which included Sikkim. None of us remembered anything about the time Sikkim became part of India in 1975, except things like how my mother had a beautiful dragon ring gifted to her by her brother who was an IAS officer posted there in 1975. As such we learnt very little about the land and its people in school. Then my friend told me there was a documentary on Sikkim, made by Satyjit Ray in 1971. I had never heard of this film, and its had a rather tragic history (Thanks, Diditi):

—(the film) has never shown in India, courtesy the ban imposed on it by the Union Government. The world lost track of Sikkim , the Ray documentary made at the request of the Chogyal, when the king’s American wife Hope Cook left the Himalayan kingdom to go back to New York, never to return.

There are only three prints of the film in existence, and two of them are beyond redemption. Hopefully, the $100,00 needed to digitally restore the print will materialize and we’ll get to see it.

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.