Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.
Organizer Wolfgang Schmidt-Sichermann reminds me to tell you all I’ll be giving a presentation May 8 at this year’s Flashconference, part of the FMX conference in Stuttgart, Germany. I had a blast when I did this in 2006 and I’m really looking forward to it!
Back to our story: we last saw Sita Sings the Blues about to have her North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival:
Friday, April 25, 8:15 pm, AMC Village VII
AMC Village VII (AV7)
66 Third Avenue (at 11th Street)
I’m happy to announce we now have a venue for the premiere afterparty:
Leela Lounge
1 W 3rd St
New York, NY 10012
They’ll make space for us as a group at 10pm onwards, and we’ll order and pay for food and drinks like other customers. They’ll also play “our” music. Yays!
I had a great time in Copenhagen! The NATFILM festival took excellent care of me, fed me well, and sent people to pick me up when I was too tired or confused to navigate the twisty streets myself. The audience for Sita was very sweet and generous and didn’t mind that the sound mysteriously switched from Dolby Surround to quiet analog stereo mid-way through the screening. Although I didn’t attend many films, the festival program looked excellent; they programmed not one, not two, but THREE Guy Maddin films, along with Sita and Loins of Punjab Presents, so they clearly have exquisite taste.
My photos here.
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.
Photos after I return next week.
Today’s New York Times Book Review contains an article on Sarah Boxer’s Ultimate Blogs, with this to say about the blog you’re reading now:
“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]
What can I say but, ‘w00t!’?
