Films: Lucky, directed by Avie Luthra and Kujo, directed by  Terrie Samundra (more info below).

When: Thursday April 4th, 7pm – 8:30pm
Where: ATA, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Tickets: Available on the night of the event, at the door.

Still from “Kunjo,” directed by Terrie Samundra

Lucky
Directed by Avie Luthra, 20 min (UK/South Africa)

Lucky is an AIDS orphan desperate to leave his rural Zulu village in South Africa for the bright lights of Durban, and also to get an education there. He is full of excitement and hope but Lucky has to learn about life the hard way, not through school or education but through an unlikely bond with a prejudiced Indian elderly women.

*Lucky has won 43 international film festival awards and was shortlisted for an Oscar.

Kunjo
Directed by Terrie Samundra, 25 min (US/India)

Presented by 1947 Archive

Discover untold stories of South Asia’s 1947 Partition. Engage through lectures, discussions, music, poetry and art. Support the preservation of first-hand accounts by bidding on donated art works or attending the benefit luncheon.

When:
11:30 am – Benefit Luncheon | Buy tickets
2:00 pm – FREE Event – Understanding Partition | Reserve Free tickets
4:00 pm – FREE Film Screening – Earth 1947 | Limited Seating – Reserve Now!

Where: UC Berkeley Skydeck | 2150 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA
Enjoy stunning 360-degree bay views from the penthouse ballroom.

View the art gallery online! | Browse and bid now | Ends April 6 @ 6:30 pm

Further info here.

Veteran British documentarian Kim Longinotto’s latest work is the remarkable story of Salma, a South Indian Muslim woman who endured a 25-year imprisonment and forced marriage by her own family and in-laws before embarking on a political career and national renown as the most famous female poet in the Tamil language. (England/India, 2013, 90 min)

When/Where

Thursday, May 2, 6:15 PM - Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
Saturday, May 4, 2:00 PM - Pacific Film Archive
Sunday, May 5, 3:45 PM - New People Cinema

For more information, visit the SFIFF website.

The Last Step
Directed by Ali Mosaffa

A Tehran engineer who’s mysteriously died, his actress wife (Leila Hatami of A Separation) and their physician friend form an ambiguous triangle in actor/director/writer Ali Mosaffa’s fascinating Iranian feature. It’s an enigmatic drama in which time and truth are slippery beasts whose gamesmanship nonetheless never lacks for emotional connection. (Iran 2012, 88 min) New Directors Prize Contender

When/Where

Saturday, May 4, 7:00 PM – New People Cinema
Wednesday, May 8, 6:15 PM – New People Cinema
Thursday, May 9, 1:00 PM – New People Cinema

For more information, visit the SFIFF website.

Vivek Bald in person

San Francisco event
When: Friday, May 17, 7:30 pm
Where: New People Cinema, Japantown
1746 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94115
Cost: $12
Buy tickets online!
The program lasts for 1.5 hours.

More details below.

Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (dir. Vivek Bald, 2003)
Combining music documentary and social documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music charts the meteoric rise of South Asian electronic music in 1990s Britain, focusing particularly on the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that pivotal decade. Shot independently on digital video between 1996 and 2002, Mutiny features Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Fun^Da^Mental, Anjali, State of Bengal, and many others, documenting a crucial moment in the cultural and political coming-of-age of Asian Britain.

“Concert footage, TV clips, interviews and more are briskly interwoven into an energetic documentary.” -Variety

“Great fun – a journey through some of the most historic moments of the diasporic musical movement.”
–Gurinder Chadha, Bend It Like Beckham

 
Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
(Harvard University Press, 2013)
In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.

The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Black Bottom, Detroit, from West Baltimore to Harlem.

Copresented with the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour
http://www.berkeleysouthasian.org/

Bollywood Trannies: Queering Desi Cinema
by Kareem Khubchandani and Anuj Vaidya

Bollywood Trannies!

When: June 8 (Saturday), 7pm
Where: ATA, San Francisco
Cost: $10 online; $12 at the door
(online ticket sales at: bollywoodtrannies.brownpapertickets.com)

An evening of satire, comedy and drop-down drag Bollywood ‘ishtyle’!!

In Khubchandani’s LESSONS IN DRAG, Professor Lahore Vagistan, a drag queen attempting to make it from the Chicago Stage to the Bollywood Screen, educates her classroom about the day’s topic, Fillum. By combining ethnographic interviews, works of fiction by queer South Asian novelists, comedic drag sequences inspired by Bollywood, and improvised audience interaction, Kareem stages the many ways in which film becomes a tool of survival for marginal subjects.

Vaidya’s BAD GIRL WITH A HEART OF GOLD finds the artist in conversation with his own film of the same name. The performance explores the genealogy of the vamp in Bollywood — from her origins in the Jewish stars of early Indian cinema and culminating in the iconic roles of the anglo-Indian actress Helen in the 60s and 70s. The performance weaves many of Helen’s signature roles together to pose the question: Can Helen escape her perpetual death by Bollywood?

This event is supported by:

When: February 28, 7 pm
Where: New People Cinema
Tickets: $5  (with discount code: 3RDMEM)

Running Time: 110mins
Language: Hindi with English subtitles

Followed by an in-depth Q&A with the filmmaker, moderated by 3rd i’s Ivan Jaigirdar

Delving deep into the underbelly of India’s film industry, where back-alley producers churn out everything from pulpy horror movies to soft-core porn, Miss Lovely takes us back to Mumbai of the 1980s with lurid detail and intoxicating style. Working out of sleazy hotels and abandoned warehouses, brothers Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and Vicky (Anil George) are prolific producers of trashy, C-grade films for Mumbai’s booming underground market. But this precarious partnership is put to the test when the brothers meet Pinky (Niharika Singh), an exquisite ingenue with a shady past.

For more information on the program and to purchase tickets, please visit the listing on the SFFS website.

When: March 16, 5-8pm
Where: Chevron Auditorium, International House, UC Berkeley
Tickets: See link below for ticket information

Renowned French playwright, screenwriter, author, actor and raconteur par excellence Jean-Claude Carrière spent eleven years in India, tracing the Mahabaharata’s roots in civilization, geography and its relevance in modern India. His nine-hour magnum opus, The Mahabharata, opened in 1985 under the stellar direction of his lifetime collaborator Peter Brook and an international cast, and quickly became a watershed moment in theatrical history across the Western world. Jean-Claude Carriére gives Bay Area audiences a simple but powerful one-man rendition of the story of Mahabharata, in the style of the old wandering minstrels of India.

For more information on the program and for tickets, please visit: http://southasia.berkeley.edu/events/JCC.pdf

still from “Midnight’s Children”

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist chronicles the life of a Pakistani man altered by 9/11. From New York City in 2001 to Lahore ten years later, Changez (Riz Ahmed) loses his grip on the American Dream and ends up disillusioned with the country he used to love.

March 17, 2013
12:00 pm
Castro Theatre, San Francisco

Reluctant Fundamentalist Panel

March 23, 2013
4:00 pm.
Union Bank Community Room, San Francisco

Midnight’s Children: Auteur Deepa Mehta (Water, SFIAAFF ’06) returns to the festival with her much-anticipated collaboration with writer Salman Rushdie, an adaptation of his award-winning novel Midnight’s Children. Born at the exact moment of India’s independence, Saleem leads “midnight’s children,” those born in India’s first hour, all with magical powers.

March 17, 2013
6:00 pm
Castro Theatre, San Francisco

Dosa Hunt: What happens when you put pianist Vijay Iyer, music critic Amrit Singh, and members of Das Racist, Vampire Weekend, Yea-sayer and Neon Indian into an Indian disco van to track down NYC’s best dosa? Plenty of Bobby Jindal jokes, heartfelt extolling of the virtues of coconut-hair oil, and even more in this journey deep into the heart of that virtuous South Asian crepe.

March 21, 2013
6:00 pm
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

For more information about these films or CAAMFest, check out the website. Details on all the films are under the Festival Guide tab.

This survey is a joint project of six Bay Area organizations: Arab Film Festival, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, Islamic Networks Group, 3rd I’s South Asian Film Festival and Zawaya, with the support of Asian American Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP).

The survey is found at surveymonkey.com

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Or send a check payable to 3rd i South Asian Independent Film . Please make sure to write your name(s) and your email address on the check. Mail checks to: 3rd i Films, PO Box 460812, San Francisco, CA 94146

SUPPORT 3rd i’s NEW FILM PRODUCTION PROGRAM! 
3rd i’s new fiscal sponsorship program helps Bay Area filmmakers find and manage completion funds for their films. This year, we are proud to support Shireen Pasha’s You of Many Days. Support 3rd i Films by helping Shireen reach her fundraising goals; Contribute to her film through IndieGoGo.