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.

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.

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.

—(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.

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.

A hauntingly beautiful film, Killer of Sheep was shot in South Central Los Angeles in the early seventies. Practically plotless, but somehow deeply dramatic, it portrays the life of Stan who is a worker at a slaughter house, his family and community. Everything about it is very specific to its milieu, its minutely observant of the small moments which constitute daily lived experience, which somehow makes the the experience of watching it feel epic. There is something amazing in the sort of specificity Burnett uses, it has the confidence that not everything is understandable to an audience, but creating a world which is coherent to its subjects, that is what translates into an authentic experience for an audience. I am reminded of one of his other films,To Sleep with Anger, which is one of my favorite films, has elements of Southern folklore and myths, to which a viewer like me is not privy, but while watching the film I can sense the depth of that experience, and that is enough to invest in the film wholeheartedly, to watch it without feeling duped, which is what I normally feel reading fiction or watching movies. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy getting duped, but its practically impossible not to notice the devices being used to manipulate a response in me, and that sort of dual attention has its own pleasures. But to have this other experience, where you can just trust the text and enter it without your defenses is a rare thing.

There is an interview and report on the movie on NPR, and an essay by Nelson Kim on senseofcinema.com.

However, the publicist for this movie should be fired. I would have never gone to the film after seeing the poster-with a scary looking Peter O’Toole, and tagline that says, ‘From the director of Notting Hilll,’ who would want to see something that aligns itself with a vile concoction of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant?