A quick update from abroad: This NATFILM festival is sweeeet. Copenhagen is possibly the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited - sorry other cities, but the medieval architecture here wins my heart. I just saw Guy Maddin’s fantastic new film “My Winnipeg,” which I missed in Berlin. Guy Maddin is one of the few filmmakers I can honestly call inspiring. Unfortunately he couldn’t attend NATFILM in person. But I did get to meet John Sayles and his partner Maggie and a bunch of really nice Danish film people at a superb homecooked dinner in a palatial (literally, in a palace) apartment here. Sweet, I tells ya.
“Sita” screens at 3pm tomorrow at Empire Bio. If you’re reading this and in Copenhagen, please come! We can hang out afterwards. NATFILM is nothing if not intimate.
“I also liked being taken off the beaten path and into a blogger’s area of obsessive, esoteric interest. In the case of the cartoonist-blogger Nina Paley, it’s the Sanskrit epic poem the “Ramayana,” which cast its spell on her as her marriage fell apart in Trivandrum, India, to which she’d moved in the first place because her husband had taken a job there. (Her blog posts and drawings document her attempt to create an animated feature based on the “Ramayana” but told from the point of view of Sita, the subjugated wife of the epic’s hero, Rama.)” [link]
This Saturday, fellow indie animatrix Signe Baumane is presenting a program called Women’s Side of Sex, including a clip from Sita. She and I and one other filmmaker will be present to answer questions and further embarrass ourselves.
Saturday March 22, at 8pm
at Millennium Film Workshop, 66 East 4th street
information: 212 673 0090
www.millenniumfilm.org
cinema@millenniumfilm.org
$8 admission
Seven seasoned in animation, sex and relationships women are going to share their sex/love stories with you :
Friday, April 25, 8:15 pm, AMC Village VII
Sunday, April 27, 3:45 pm, AMC 19th Street East
Monday, April 28, 10:45 pm, AMC Village VII
Thursday, May 1, 1:45 pm, Village East Cinemas
Friday, May 2, 3:00 pm, AMC 19th Street East
AMC Village VII (AV7)
66 Third Avenue (at 11th Street)
New York, NY 10003
AMC 19th Street East (A19)
890 Broadway (at 19th Street)
New York, NY 10003
Village East Cinemas (VEC)
181 Second Avenue (at 12th Street)
New York, NY 10003
Do you like filling in forms? Do you like putting things in envelopes? Do you like going to the post office? How about running errands? All for no money!
If this sounds like your dream job, I need someone to come to my unglamorous Manhattan studio once a week and do all of the above. You can probably get college credit for it. And learn something? Apply here.
above: just some of the mess you could help clean up!
I want to attend an Indian seder this year, but I don’t know any Indian Jews here (although totally secular, I am an Ashkenazi Jew). I also like Indian food. And I have sufficient chutzpah to ask, in public, to be invited to an Indian seder. I’ll bring grape juice!
Remember when I wrote about Stephen Wells? Well I finally had lunch with him last week. Vegan, of course - Stephen is the Executive Director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Over the delicious fried offerings of Red Bamboo we agreed that the only way animal abuse is going to get curbed is by passing and enforcing laws against it. Which the ALDF is doing. I’m not vegan* myself, but even carnivores could (and do) support this work. Stephen and I also commiserated about this sort of thing - a man after my own heart.
*I’m generally classified as vegetarian, but I occasionally eat sea creatures. In case you want to take me out to lunch (see below).
Would YOU like to be featured in Links for Lunch? Then buy me lunch. My email address is at the bottom of the middle column, the one with the pictures linking to my movies and cartoons and stuff.
An ongoing feature in which I recommend the work and websites of people who buy me lunch. Today’s entry: people I’ve neglected to post about who bought me lunch in Berlin!
Pierre-Jean Duffour and Stéphanie Gerlier (above) of MASALADOSA attempted to buy me lunch but were intercepted by Sita patron/Temple Construction Engineer Tom Swain (with wife Elke, below). However the next day they managed to pay for my food at the Teddy Awards party. I can’t praise the music of MASALADOSA enough. They found me online, sent me their music, and now it’s in Sita Sings the Blues. Hopefully I’ll see them again soon in France - fingers crossed for the Annecy festival, to which I submitted as soon as I got back. Kaisa Penttilä, a Finnish animator living in Berlin, saw Sita and subsequently emailed me. One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, she bought me lunch.
Bonus lunch: Greg Sextro, and Reena Shah and I were also treated to lunch at the Berlinale Lunch Club.
Would YOU like to be featured in Links for Lunch? Then buy me lunch. My email address is at the bottom of the middle column, the one with the pictures linking to my movies and cartoons and stuff.
Vi bøjer Bollywoodbegrebet med ‘Sita Sings the Blues’, men det gør vi gerne, for Nina Paleys debutanimation i spillefilmslængde, der vandt en special mention på filmfestivalen i Berlin i februar, er i sandhed en film ud over det sædvanlige….(more)
As you may have heard, Emru Townsend, Editor of Frames Per Second Magazine is suffering from leukemia and is in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. None of his relatives are a match, so he is relying on outside donors. We are asking you to help us encourage members of the animation community to join a bone marrow registry – you or someone you know may be the match Emru is hoping for!
Because tissue types are inherited, patients are more likely to match someone from their own race or ethnicity. As an Afro-Caribbean, Emru Townsend will be most likely to match other donors of African or Caribbean decent. So please urge anyone in your circle with this racial background to participate.
I’d just like to make one small correction: although there’s a better chance of a match from someone of the same ethnic background, it doesn’t mean I have no chance of matching anyone else. It’s better for me (and everyone else waiting for a transplant) if everyone registers. Registering is easy and, at worst, as painful as a blood test.
I wanted to spread the word here. Emru did a big article on me and Sita in 2005.
