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2021 UPDATE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN IN 2009, PRIOR TO THE FILMMAKER'S GENDER CRITICAL STANCE. TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.
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The Dubai Film Festival, like all other things coming from the Golden City, is all gilded decadence but no substance. So while everything becomes abuzz with star sightings and lavish red carpet displays, the actual films become lost in the shuffle.
That goes double if you're a small foreign indie with no star power.
I attended the 2008 festival, where I fell in love with a couple of smaller films that never really got any attention. Perhaps last year's festival was especially tough. The opener was Oliver Stone's W and much of the tail end of the December festival was already stricken by Slumdog fever. A brightly animated retelling of an Indian religious folktale, touching on the theme of gender and relationships never really stood a chance with that crowd.
So that's what brings me to Sita Sings the Blues by American animator Nina Paley. Outside of the festival circuit, Paley was besot by difficulties in distributing the film- particularly of the copyright variety.
Due to the hurdles in getting her film released in any form, Paley eventually took it unto herself and went all "Radiohead" on the distribution process- releasing it online, for free.
You can stream/download the whole film in various formats here. Paley's copyright even extends to free use in public screenings.
So what's it about anyway? Sita is essentially a retelling of a story from the Ramayana. The film is framed by that of a modern day couple, modeled on Paley herself and her ex-husband, whose increasingly rocky relationship parallels the Sita-Rama story arc. The film struck a chord with me not just for its storytelling, but the visual style itself. Narrated by Shadow Puppets with a tendency to talk over one another, Sita's musical monologues, (which are all tunes by 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw), are done in a bright quirky style, as seen above.
These are undercut by vignettes done in the style of traditional Rajput paintings, and Dr. Katz-esque Squigglevission.
My favorite part is a rotoscoped fire dance sequence, which you can see here, at around 6:40.
Lovely, ain't it? I don't know if the web format even does it justice; this sequence alone warranted a viewing on the big screen in all it's giant impactful glory. I could describe more of its content to you in detail, but you should really just get on and watch it. And if you end up liking it, pick up a DVD or a Tshirt. Support real independents!
