Sneak Peek 3

SPOTLIGHT ON SRI LANKAN FILMMAKER PRASANNA VITHANAGE

Born in 1962, Prasanna Vithanage’s opus of five previous films has made him one of Sri Lanka ’s leading filmmakers with a worldwide critical and popular reputation. He began his career in the 1980’s as a theatre director. He translated into Sinhala and directed Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man in 1986 and Dario Fo’s Raspberries and Trumpets in 1991, before setting out as a filmmaker in 1992.  He returned to his theatrical roots in 2006 when he wrote, directed and produced two hugely popular Sinhala one act plays Horu Samaga Heluwen which ran to nearly 150 performances islandwide. Vithanage also produced Uberto Pasolini’s Machan, the international co-production, which debuted at the Venice International Film Festival in Summer 2008.

Mr. Vithanage will be present at the festival.

DEATH ON A FULL MOON DAY (Pura Handa Kaluwara)

Language: Sinhala
Running time: 74 mins Starring: Joe Abeywickrama, Priyanka Samaraweera, Linton Semage

Considered to be a modern day classic of Sinhalese Cinema, The film deals with the brutal war between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamils living in the North of the Island. When Vannihamy (Joe Abeywickrama) is presented by the army with the remains of his son, the the old man refuses to sign the compensation papers, and insists that his son is still alive. Influenced by Satyajit Ray, this impassioned and impartial neo-realist film uses a spare style and little music, focusing instead on the excellent performances, and the pathos emanating from Vithanage’s script.

The Sinhalese government and military, fearing the film would hamper the army’s recruitment of rural youth and focus public attention on social and political problems in Sri Lanka, suspended its screening indefinitely. Vithanage appealed to the courts. The Sri Lanka Supreme Court eventually directed the government to lift the ban and awarded the director compensation and damages.

Pura Handa Kaluwara has won numerous awards, including the Grand Prix Golden Unicorn for Best Feature Film at the Amiens International Film Festival, the International Film Critics Federation Award at the Fribourg (Switzerland) International Film Festival, and the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Film at the Singapore International Film Festival in 1999.

FLOWERS OF THE SKY (Akasa Kusum)
Running time:90 minutes
Sri Lanka, 2008
Cast: Dilhani Ekanayake, Kaushalaya Fernando, Malini Fonseka, Nimmi Harasgama

A mother’s search for a daughter she has never met.
Sandhya Rani (Malini Fonseka), an ageing film star, was once the darling of the silver screen. Having lost fame and fortune in a changing world, she now lives quietly in obscurity. She ekes out a living by renting out a room in her home to the film and television stars of today to satisfy their illicit sexual desires. The popular young film star, Shalika (Dilhani Ekanayake), uses this room to carry on an affair with a young actor. When Shalika’s infidelity is unmasked by her husband, the scandal and its publicity forces Rani into the limelight again. In the spotlight once again, Rani is suddenly forced to come to terms with a dark secret of her past – a secret she thought she had buried forever. As she confronts the demons of her past, she journeys in search of a truth she abandoned long ago.

Awards:
Silver Peacock Award (Best Actress), Indian 39th International Film Festival (2008)
Jury Special Mention At Vesoul Asian Film Festival (2009)
Best Asian Film (Netpac) Award – Granada Cines
Del Sur Film Festival

Sneak Peek 2

KARMA CALLING
Directed by Sarba Das, 2008
Running time: 90min
Hindi and English

AUDIENCE AWARD WINNER Los Angeles Asian American Film Festival, May 2009

When karma calls, you can’t hang up.

What happens when a bunch of hapless Hindus from Hoboken get mixed up with an underworld don with connections to an Indian call center? And what happens when a good Jersey girl falls for a smooth operator thousands of miles away? For one thing, the phone keeps ringing.
Meet the Raj family. Deep in denial about its creeping credit card debt, dodging collection notices and phone calls. When eldest daughter Sonal finally picks up the phone, she meets a call center operator like no other, Rob Roy. Little does she know that he’s oceans away. Her brother Shyam, a college drop out, is too busy dreaming of becoming the next Dr. Dre (peddling his hip-hop album Hapa Means Weed in Japanese), to notice the bills piling up. But romance is in the air for him too, in the form of Radha, a village girl from India, arriving in America to marry a Dollar Store mogul. As for the youngest daughter Jamuna, well, she just wants a Bat Mitzvah. And another bag of Doritos.
Add to this mix Mausi, a chai-fueled Mary Poppins fresh from India, hell bent on getting this meat-eating, energy-wasting, spendthrift family in line. Little does she know that the Gods have it all figured out.

Narrated by award-winning actor Tony Sirico (aka “Paulie Walnuts” of The Sopranos), Karma Calling is a snapshot of our hyper-globalized world through the eyes of a Garden state family just trying to get by. It’s a quintessential American tale about unlikely alliances, outsourcing, and outwitting. And at its heart, it is the story of a family learning to live together.

GULABI TALKIES
Directed by Girish Kasaravalli, 2008
Story by well-known feminist writer Vaidehi
Cast: Umashree, K.G. Krishna Murthy, M.D. Pallavi, Poornima Mohan, Ashok Sandip
Running time: 122 minutes
Kannada

Best Film in Indian Competition and best Actress in Indian Competition at Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, 2008

Best film, best screenplay, best actress at Karnataka State Annual Film Awards, 2009

Women in an Indian village discover that the love of a good story crosses many boundaries in this drama from Girish Kasaravalli. It is 1999 in a coastal town near Kundapura, and Gulabi, the local midwife, has had a hard life – she’s one of the only Muslims in a primarily Hindu community, and her husband Musa has left her to take another wife. Gulabi loves nothing more than a good movie, and she’s hesitant to leave a picture midway, through when she’s summoned to help a local woman give birth. Gulabi grudgingly assists with the delivery, and the grateful family presents her lavish gift – a color television, the first in the village, and a satellite dish to go with it. Given her faith and her marital troubles, Gulabi is something of an outcast in town, but when word gets around about her television, a handful of women from the neighborhood begin stopping to watch soap operas with her (though some are content to just peek though the windows at her new set). One of Gulabi’s new friends is Netru, who has husband troubles of her own, and the two women bond over their shared troubled and love of the daily serials. But with India and Pakistan at war, tensions between Muslims and Hindus reach a new high, and when Netru disappears, many accuse Gulabi of foul play.

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7 DAYS IN SLOW MOTION
Directed by Umakanth Thumrugoti, 2009
US PREMIERE
Running time: 101 min
Hindi and English, India
Cast: Teja, Kunal Sharma, Shiva Varma, Rajeshwari Sachdev-Badola, Ayesha Jaleel, Vivek Mushran

Set in middle-class India, 7 Days in Slow Motion marks the comical yet thoughtful journey of a 6th grader Ravi and his friends whose lives change when they chance upon a camera of a visiting American tourist. Their insatiable love for movies push them into a film-making mission of their own, but their path is riddled with problems: they only have 7 days to make the film as their final school exams begin in 7 days.
Ravi uses creative ways to keep his friends involved in the project during the stressful exam season. But his movie-making project accidentally captures some darker moments of his friends’ and families’ lives which get revealed in a party where everyone suddenly sees on the screen who they are and what they represent.
7 Days in Slow Motion in a subtle way, shows a kid’s rebellion against a system where there is a lot of pressure to succeed academically. It is a beautifully pictured comedy of errors about a film-making project by children, where adults see the truth through a child’s eyes and his ‘borrowed’ camera.

KALA PUL (THE BLACK BRIDGE)
Directed by Saqib Mausoof, 2008
US PREMIERE
Narrative Short, 42 minutes
Urdu-English, US-Pakistan
Director: Saqib Mausoof
Cast: Salim Iqbal, Angeline Malik, Munawar Saeed, Ayesha Toor

Kala Pul is named after a bridge in Karachi which connects the affluent parts of the city and the lower income areas.

It is a dark journey into the heart of Karachi’s militancy by the protagonist, Arsalan, who returns to this gritty megalopolis after 12 years to investigate the violent death of his brother at the hands of religious fundamentalists. On his arrival in Karachi, Arsalan finds himself estranged from his rancorous family, in which his anglicized father is at odds with his devoutly militant younger brother. Arsalan has to navigate these diverging and conflicting paths to discover his dead brother’s past and Karachi’s future.
The plot uses the bridge as a metaphor providing a thriller ride between two completely different worlds – the hip side of Karachi and its disenfranchised youth growing up in the “Kalashnikov culture”.