3rd i and CAAM have programmed a collection of fantastic short films & music videos from many local cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Fremont and Palo Alto.

Date: May 19, 2012
Time: 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Location: Asian Art Museum, Samsung Hall, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco

PROGRAM GUIDE:

MY NAME IS SEVEN, Dir. D.B. Cheng, 7 min.
Seven is a true B-boy deep inside, but will his moves impress the girl of his dreams? Steven Terada and Brian Hirano, members of QuestCrew, join the cast of this fun short film.

TERRA COTTA, Dir. Yasmine Gomez, 6 min.
“Maybe sometimes…you need something to unsettle. Maybe that something is the best part.” Watch what happens when one roommate gets fed up with the status quo.

ROOTS OF LOVE, Dir. Harjant Gill, 30 min.
Told through the stories of six different men ranging in age from fourteen to eighty-six, Roots of Love documents the changing significance of hair and the turban among Sikhs in India. The choice of cutting one’s hair is one that not only concerns the individual and his family, but an entire community.

MELODY WALKS, by DreamDate, Produced by Heather MacLean, 3 min.
Set at the scenic Pacifica Pier, this music video features a live performance from the indie/folk-trio.

LOVE HACKING, Dir. Jenni Nelson, 21 min.
A virtual relationship becomes a reality when a robot inventor falls in love online and journeys to Nepal to meet his fiancé for the first time.

MAKING NOISE IN SILENCE, Dir. Mina T. Son, 3 min.
Class is in session at the California School for the Deaf; it’s a typical American high school, with jocks, nerds, misfits, cheerleaders, and new kids. In Making Noise in Silence, follow two Korean American teens as they discover what it means to be both deaf and Korean.

IT’S BEAUTIFUL, By Hopie ft. Luckylam, Dir. Stretch, 5 min.
Northern California meets Southern California on this fun, upbeat music video featuring Living Legends rapper, LuckyIAm.

LADY RAZORBACK, Dir. Laura Green, 4 min.
When a group of Pacific Islander women struggles to start a rugby team in East Palo Alto, they find the field to be an unexpected sanctuary.

WAITING FOR A TRAIN: THE TOSHIO HIRANO STORY, Dir. Oscar Bucher, 21 min.
A Japanese musician’s lifelong love of bluegrass takes him on a mission of discovery into the heartland of America.

Valley of Saints
Dir: Musa Syeed

SCREENINGS
Sun, Apr 22 6:15 / PFA
Fri, Apr 27 6:30 / Kabuki
Sat, Apr 28 9:15 / Kabuki

For showtimes and tickets visit festival.sffs.org.

About the Film
A summertime destination since the Mughal emperors ruled the Indian subcontinent, Dal Lake has been called the Venice of Asia. Tucked in the Kashmir Valley and fed by the surrounding snow-capped Himalayas, it boasts a network of floating gardens, ancient Sufi ruins and ornate houseboats built during the British Raj. The local community of fishermen and farmers increasingly rely on tourism to earn a living. But the lake is shrinking and the water polluted, threatening not only their livelihoods but also their lives. Shot during the 2010 mass protests calling for the demilitarization of Kashmir, Musa Syeed’s feature film debut narrows in on Gulzar, a boatman, and his childhood friend Afzal, planning their escape to New Delhi. When a military-imposed curfew delays their departure, they encounter a young visiting scientist (played by Kashmiri TV actress Neelofar Hamid) who is studying the environmental impact of urbanization on the lake. With a cast dominated by nonprofessional actors and set against real-time events, Valley of Saints feels as much like a documentary as fiction, bearing intimate witness to a world on the cusp of change while slowly revealing how that change, even as it is propelled by disaster, also holds promise.

3rd i Co-presents at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival 2012:

Abu, Son of Adam, March 11 & 18,
and Delhi in a Day, March 13 & 15

Abu, Son of Adam
Salim Ahmed / India / 101 min

Indiaʼs official entry to the 84th Academy Awards is a meditative story of the determination of an aging couple to perform the Islamic pilgrimage of Hajj. This simple yet revelatory cinematic experience unpretentiously explores virtue, loyalty, and
devotion against the picturesque simplicity of rural Kerala.

March 11, 2012, 12:00 pm, SF Film Society Cinema at New People, San Francisco
March 18th, 2012, 4:45 pm, Camera 3 Cinemas San Jose
For tickets and more information:

http://festival.caamedia.org/30/guide/program/abu-son-of-adam/

Delhi in a Day
Prashant Nair / India / 2011 / 88 min

The nouveau-riche Ghambir family resides in a palatial mansion in South Delhi. When the idealistic son of an important British business associate arrives, he finds his presence has upset the natural order of things. A comedic portrayal of class differences in a contemporary Delhi family home.

March 13th, 2012, 9 pm, Sundance Kabuki Cinemas SF
March 15th, 2012, 6:45 pm, Sundance Kabuki
For tickets and more information:

http://festival.caamedia.org/30/guide/program/delhi-in-a-day/

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3rd i Co-presents with Oddball Films: EXPERIMENTA India
Experimental Short films from India

When: Friday, March 23rd at 7:30pm*
Where: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10* Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

What: Shai Heredia, Experimenta India’s Festival Director, has curated and will introduce 2 programs that highlight contemporary works as well as trace a history of Indian experimental film beyond Bollywood and the industrial system and offer a non-Western perspective on artists’ film as an alternative to the dominant US and Eurocentric histories.

*Note early start time. The price of a single admission ticket allows access to both shows. They will run back to back with a 15min intermission. Total run time for both programs is 125min.

PROGRAM 1: Retrospective includes:
And I Make Short Films (S.N.S.Sastry, 1968) An impressionistic portrayal of short-film making by a short-film maker.
Abid (Pramod Pati, 1972) A rapidly moving series of photographed drawings, in pixilation.
Claxplosion (1968, Pramod Pati) Using pixilation and electronic music, this is an experimental family planning film.
Trip (Pramod Pati 1970) A film on Bombay that uses pixellation to depict the transitory nature of daily life in an urban context.
Explorer (Pramod Pati, 1968) Pati attempts to portray a country caught between a number of opposing and diverging tendencies.
Child on Chess Board (Vijay B. Chandra, India, 1979) This abstract narrative, deals with the parallel themes of “Man with all knowledge” and “Child, the father of man.”

PROGRAM 2: Contemporary Works
Jan Villa (Natasha Mendonca, 2011), After the monsoon floods of 2005 that submerged Bombay, the filmmaker returns to her city to examine the personal impact of the devastating event.
City Beyond (Shreyasi Kar, 2011,) City Beyond is a film that speculates about the lives led by the inhabitants of a submerged civilization. The superstructure has been recently discovered in the crevices of the ocean floor.
Bare (Santana Issar, 2006) A poignant short in which the filmmaker uses home-movie footage and recorded telephone conversations to reach out to her alcoholic father.
There is Something in the Air (Iram Ghufran, 2011) There is Something in the Air is a call from the periphery of sanity.

Full details about the short films and event:

http://oddballfilms.blogspot.com/2012/02/experimenta-india-fri-mar-23-730pm.html

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3rd i Co-presents with the Asian Art Museum–A Talk: Shakespeare and Hindi Cinema

When: Saturday, March 31st at 01:00PM
Where: Asian Art Museum, Samsung Hall, 200 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA 94102
Admission: FREE with museum admission.

This talk, co-presented with 3rd i, will explore adaptations of Shakespeare in popular Hindi cinema, a.k.a. Bollywood. Through clips from films as varied as Shakespeare, Wallah, Angoor, and Omkara, Gitanjali Shahani will explore the colonial contexts of Shakespearean production and the post-colonial contexts of Shakespearean reproduction in India. Shahani is Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University where she teaches courses on Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama as well as contemporary South Asian literatures.

For more information: http://www.asianart.org/helios/events/index.php?eID=2491

from the short "Vakratunda Swaha" by Ashish Avikuntak

When: February 26, 2012, 1:30pm
Where: Artists Television Access (ATA, 992 Valencia St, SF)
Cost: $8 (Cash only; At the door)
TRT: 90mins + q&a

Meenakshi Shedde in Person!

Meenakshi Shedde, leading Mumbai-based film critic and India consultant for the Berlin and Dubai Int’l Film Festivals, speaks about the state of contemporary Indian filmmaking and brings a package of award-winning shorts from India over the last 4 years. The program includes a diverse range of films, both in terms of content and form, and showcases the best in contemporary short filmmaking on the subcontinent. Come see new cutting-edge work from India, and stay for a lively discussion on the changing face of cinema in South Asia with an expert in the field.

Program Includes:

Udedh Bun (Unravel) by Siddharth Sinha
2008, 21 mins
SILVER BEAR, Berlin Film Festival
Powerful coming-of-age story of a schoolboy and the first stirrings of his sexuality.

Mehfuz (Safe) by Rohit Pandey
2011, 16mins
Dubai Film Festival, 2^nd prize
If death is a poem, can necrophilia be a tender love story? (With Anurag Kashyap Films)

Three of Us by Umesh Kulkarni
2008, 15 mins
Berlin Film Festival
An aging couple bring up their disabled adult son: a deeply moving paean to dignity.

Vakratunda Swaha by Ashish Avikunthak
2010, 22 mins
An experimental film that connects the mythic and futuristic, through images of a Ganesh visarjan (ritual immersion of the elephant-headed God) in the sea in Bombay (pictured above)

Vitthal by Vinoo Choliparambil
2009, 24 mins
National Award, Best Short; 2^nd Prize , Asian First Feature FF, Dubai FF; Special mention, Osians FF; Best Short, Lyon Asian FF.

More about Meenakshi Shedde:
Meenakshi Shedde won the National Award for Best Film Critic and was presented the Swarna Kamal (Golden Lotus Award) by the President of India. She has covered international film festivals for over a decade, including those in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, Paris, Argentina, Pusan, Mannheim-Heidelberg, Oberhausen (Germany), Vila do Conde (Portugal), New Delhi and Thiruvananthapuram. She was also on the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Jury of the Cannes Film Festival (2001), Berlin Film Festival (2000 and 2012) and Venice Film Festival (2002). She was on the International Jury of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Argentina (2006); Asian Film Award Jury, Hong Kong Film Festival (2007); and the National Jury for the Indian Panorama of the International Film Festival of India, Goa (2004). She has written for two books on Indian cinema for Au Sud du Cinema (Cahiers du Cinema/Arte) and on Bollywood for Bollywood: Das Indische Kino und die Schweiz (Museum fur Gestaltung, Switzerland).

Check out the festival website for complete program information:

www.thirdi.org/festival

AT THE ARAB FILM FESTIVAL:

What: SHORTS PROGRAM
Where: Embarcadero Cinema, San Francisco
When: Saturday, October 15, 2011, 12:00pm

What: SHORTS PROGRAM
Where: Camera 12, San Jose
When: Saturday, October 15, 2011, 6:30pm

For more information on both programs, and the complete Arab Film Festival schedule, please click here.

AT UNAFF:
What: PINK SARIS, by Kim Longinotto
Where: Aquarius 1, 430 Emerson Street, Palo Alto
When: Friday, October 21, 7:40pm

For more information on the film, and the complete UNAFF schedule, please click here.

3rd i puts on its queer eye again this summer! Join us for a weekend of films and performances celebrating LGBT stories from contemporary Sri Lanka to ancient India.

August 27: FILM

Flying with One Wing
Asoka Handagama (Sri Lanka, 2002, 81mins)

When: 7pm
Where: Artist’s Television Access (992 Valencia Street, CA 94110)
Cost: $8 at the door

In anticipation of a focus on Sri Lanka at our annual festival this November, 3rd i reaches back into its vault to bring this festival favorite from 2003. Undoubtedly one of the the most revolutionary films to come out of South Asia, Flying With One Wing, is an engaging parable of a person creating a life amidst a culture that deems their existence criminal. The film captures the reality of women living in present day Sri Lanka and addresses gender politics in a male dominated society from a novel perspective. Flying With One Wing is an edgy, gender-altering story that manages to remain lighthearted and humorous despite the building tensions that culminate with unexpected results. In short, a Sri Lankan cross between Fassbinder and Boys Don’t Cry.

August 28: LIVE

Brihannala, Aniruddhan Vasudevan
The Unicorn and The Seeker, Minal Hajratwala
Janaki – Daughter of the Dirt (Sneak Preview), The Siren Theater Project

Followed by Artist Reception

When: 5pm
Where: The Women’s Building, San Francisco
Cost: $8-$15 at the door (sliding scale), includes reception

Two artists take us on a queer journey through India’s past in this afternoon of dance and literature.

Brihannala
Chennai-based performer Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s monologue mixes storytelling, spoken word, classical dance and music to explore the performance of gender and sexuality. As he performs a character from the Mahabharata, Brihannala – a eunuch form that the hero Arjuna assumes for a year – it becomes a reference point for the artist’s own performance of gender, his desires and the questions that arise therein.

The Unicorn and The Seeker: Readings from New Works
Minal Hajratwala — San Francisco-based poet, performer, and author — will share selections of new work created during her recent Fulbright fellowship in India. This body of writing includes novelistic ecstasy, chimaeric poetry, explosions at the India-Pakistan border, and more… Her upcoming novel, set 500 years in the past (during the life of Mirabai, a North Indian devotional poet) and 500 years in the future (in a queer punk dystopia) explores yearning, devotion, surrender, the sacred and the sexual. Her poetry manuscript, The Unicorn at the Racetrack, is inspired by the 5000-year-old Indus Valley unicorn images.

SNEAK PREVIEW:
Catch a 10 minute sneak preview of The Siren Theater Project‘s upcoming production of Janaki – Daughter of the Dirt, a story of ancient archetypes that reflects modern day dilemmas. t is the journey of a young woman who looks to her own personal superhero, “Sita” also known as “Janaki”, for answers to life’s problems. Only this Sita is not the perfect woman as is portrayed in the ancient “Ramayana”, one of Hinduism’s most known and revered epics. Please click here for more information on the upcoming premiere of this play.

The Artist Reception (following the event) will take place in the same theater as the performance/reading.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Asoka Handagama is a renowned Sri Lankan filmmaker and theater artist who has received numerous awards for his films at festivals across Asia. Some of his other films include Moon Hunt (1996), Moon Lady (1998), and This is My Moon (2000). His last film Vidhu (2010), a children’s film, was an ingenious response to the censorship of his 2005 masterpiece Letter of Fire. Handagama remade this film as a children’s film and received both critical and popular acclaim, establishing him as one of the most unique voices in Sri Lankan cinema today.

Aniruddhan Vasudevan is a performer, activist and writer based in Chennai, India. His has trained in the Indian classical dance form, Bharata Natyam, with none other than the renowned dancer Chitra Visweswaran. His most recent collaborative work has been with Lakshmi Sriraman, based in Lexington, Kentucky, in choreographing and presenting “And She Said….,” a dance-theater work based on Tamil women poets’ work on love and war. This work toured different cities of the United States in Fall 2010.

Minal Hajratwala is a poet, performer, and writer based in San Francisco. Her nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents won four literary awards and was called “incomparable” by Alice Walker and “searingly honest” by the Washington Post. She is a graduate of Stanford University and was a National Arts Journalism Program fellow at Columbia University.

Funding for this program provided by:

Jonas Parienté and Mathias Mangin’s Next Year in Bombay

Founded in 1980, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is the first and largest of its kind in the world. Today, they are more than a festival: they are the leading advocate for independent Jewish cinema. The 31st festival will be held July 21 – August 8, 2011, in San Francisco, Berkeley, the Peninsula and Marin County. More information is available on the festival website at:
http://www.sfjff.org/

Next Year in Bombay
Jonas Parienté and Mathias Mangin (France/India, 2010, 55m)

When: July 28, 2011, 1:30pm
Where: Castro Theatre

Screening with the short film, Starring David (19 min.)
Next Year in Bombay profiles the surprising diversity of India’s Jewish communities, some of which have existed for over 2,500 years. Now, however, they are struggling to maintain their culture and traditions as their populations dwindle. At the heart of the film is the story of a young couple torn between their desire to see Judaism thrive in India and their commitment to providing their children with a Jewish education only possible if they move to Israel. Click here for more information about screening times, venues and tickets.

The Search: The Seeker: The Spirit

When: Saturday July 9, 2011, 7pm
Where: Artists’ Television Access
Cost: $6 at the door

The program will include the premiere of her new film METTA, the third in her series of experimental documentaries about spirituality; a sneak preview from her new film, MOMENTS OF BEING: MAGICAL MESSAGES; as well as a magical raffle — proceeds of which will support her upcoming documentary, STORIES FROM THE PATH: STORIES ABOUT MODERN DAY MINDFULNESS. In the same way that Kirthi’s films are like poetic voyages into the landscape of emotions, tonight’s program also promises to be a journey…towards the cinemagical!

For more information on the artist’s work, please visit her website at: www.kirthinath.com

Sonali Gulati’s I AM

I AM
Director: Sonali Gulati
TRT: 85 mins (with short)

When: Friday, June 17, 7pm
Where:Roxie Theater

What do parents say when they find out their child is gay? What if they never get the chance to respond? Eleven years after her mother’s death, award-winning lesbian filmmaker Sonali Gulati returns to her hometown of New Delhi, India, to clean out her house and make peace with the parent she never came out to. In her meditative and personal new documentary, I Am, Gulati interviewed twenty-one Indian families over the course of five years to unravel the intricacies and difficulties of coming out in India.

Showing with the short, Time Out (Natalie Mulford) about a teen who is curious about his newfound attraction to girls.

Read more about the films and purchase tickets at: http://www.frameline.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=2167&FID=48