South Asian Underground Film Festival

EMERGENCES AND EMERGENCIES: NEW SOUTH ASIAN FILM-MAKING FROM BRITAIN

Curated by Sukhdev Sandhu, Assistant Professor of English and A/P/A Studies at NYU

All films are shown at CANTOR FILM CENTER, 36 EAST 8TH STREET
Seating is first-come/first-serve; doors open 15 minutes prior to screening.

FRIDAY, APRIL 20
7pm-10pm in Theater 200

My Son The Fanatic
Kick-off screening
Featuring a Q&A with Hanif Kureishi

Join Hanif Kureishi, internationally-renowned author (THE BUDDHA OF SURBURBIA), Oscar-nominated screenwriter (MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDERETTE), and playwright for a special screening of this prescient 1997 drama. Om Puri stars as a Pakistani taxi driver who enters into a passionate relationship with a Northern prostitute much to the disgust of his increasingly fundamentalist son.

Screening Co-Sponsored by New York University\\\’s Tisch School of the Arts, The Maurice Kanbar Institute

SATURDAY, APRIL 21
2pm-10pm in Theater 101

2pm — Young, Angry and Muslim (2005, dir. Julian Hendy) and Bradford Riots (2006, dir. Neil Biswas)
Discussion with Steve Chandra Savale from Asian Dub Foundation

Young, Angry and Muslim (2005, dir. Julian Hendy), 48 min
In the wake of the London Underground bombings in July 2005, Navid Akhtar, a British Pakistani Muslim, journeys across the country to explore the tensions and alienation within his community and asks how this has contributed to the terror attacks. As part of his passionate and very personal documentary, Akhtar also returns to his parents’ Kashmiri village and agonises over whether to sell the land he has inherited from his recently deceased father.

Bradford Riots (2006, dir. Neil Biswas), 75 min
The July 2001 riots in the Northern city of Bradford were the most violent to hit the United kingdom in over two decades. 191 men, most of them locally-born Pakistani Muslims, were jailed for a total of more than 500 years. Neil Biswas’s meticulously researched drama goes beyond the tabloid headlines to present a fascinating portrait, influenced visually by La Haine and The Battle of Algiers, and scored by Asian Dub Foundation, of an immigrant community riven by religious and generational tension. New York premiere.

5pm — The Road To Guantanamo (2004, dir. Michael Winterbottom)

The Road To Guantanamo (2004, dir. Michael Winterbottom), 95 min
Winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, this is the true story of three British Muslims, subsequently known as the ‘Tipton Three’, who traveled to Pakistan to attend a wedding, only to end up being held for two years without charges in the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Shot in Winterbottom’s characteristic part-dram, part-documentary style, it has been described by the New York Times as a “film of staggering force”.

8pm — A Love Supreme (2001, dir. Nilesh Patel) and The Warrior (2001, dir. Asif Kapadia)

A Love Supreme (2001, dir. Nilesh Patel), 9 min
Nilesh Patel’s debut film is a beautifully shot and multi-award-winning audio-visual essay on the preparation of samosas by his mother. Influenced, unexpectedly, by sequences in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, it makes the daily dishes cooked by Asian mothers resemble exquisite art installations.

The Warrior (2001, dir. Asif Kapadia), 82 min
Kapadia’s debut feature is a ravishing Western in which the drama has been relocated to the deserts of feudal Rajasthan. Irfan Khan plays a bloodythirsty warlord’s henchman who decides to lay down arms. In consequence, his only son is killed. He finds himself travelling deeper and deeper into a wilderness that is both geographic and spiritual. Magisterial in pace and sweep, this fully deserves the comparisons to Kurosawa and Leone that enthusiastic international critics have been making since its release.

SUNDAY, APRIL 22
2pm-10pm in Theater 101

2pm — India Calling (2002, dir. Sonali Fernando) and Otolith (2003, dir. The Otolith Group)” (2003)

India Calling (2002, dir. Sonali Fernando), 50 min
The first and still the best documentary about the modern-day call centre, this is a deliciously ironic portrait of a David Brett-style Australian boss who has arrived in Delhi to effect a self-proclaimed revolution in the working practices of twenty-something Indian graduates. Acclaimed film-maker Fernando ensures that the black comedy is leavened with a probing and deeply empathetic study of the yearning, aspirational call agents themselves.

Otolith (2003, dir. The Otolith Group), 22 min
Influenced by the work of Chris Marker and the Black Audio Film Collective, and with stunning sound design from the latter’s Trevor Matthison, Otolith is an eerie cinematic essay that doubles as a rare example of post-colonial science fiction. Moving between the zero-gravity astronaut-training centre at Star City and the two-million-protestor-strong anti-war protests in London in early 2003, it’s a meditation on utopianism, Third World socialism and the nature of
colonialism’s visual archive.

5pm — England Expects (2004, dir. Tony Smith)

England Expects (2004, dir. Tony Smith), 124 min
The New York premiere of this controversial and no-holds-barred drama about a responsible family man, living in the shadow of London’s financial district, whose life falls apart after he develops a sexual obsession with a trader at the investment bank where he works as a security guard. His meltdown, of a ferocity that recalls both Taxi Driver and the work of the late Alan Clarke, brings him into violent conflict with local Bangladeshis. As powerful and incisive a post-9/11 film as has yet been made.

8pm — MUTINY: Asians Storm British Music (2003, dir. Vivek Bald) and Skin Deep (2001, dir. Yousaf Ali Khan)

Combining music documentary and social documentary, MUTINY: ASIANS STORM BRITISH MUSIC charts the meteoric rise of Asian music in 1990s Britain, as well as the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Shot independently on digital video over the course of seven years, MUTINY features Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Fun^Da^Mental and a host of other British musicians of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi descent, presenting these artists and their music with depth, intimacy, and intensity. Rarely screened in New York since its completion in 2003, this is a film not to be missed.

DISCUSSION: Director of MUTINY, Vivek Bald, and Asian Dub Foundation guitarist Steve Chandra Savale, moderated by renowned music journalist Vivien Goldman.

Join the filmmakers and festival goers at the film festival Afterparty to follow this screening at Leela Lounge, located at One West 3rd Street at Broadway.

Festival Co-sponsors:
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, The Maurice Kanbar Institute, NYU Center for Media, Culture and History and Center for Media and Religion, Asian Cinevision, Imaginasian Theater, Leela Lounge.