Sita Sings the Blues
Sita Sings the Blues
Celestial Cinema Program
(2008, 82 mins)
HDCAM
Hawai'i Premiere
Directed By: Nina Paley
Producer: Nina Paley
Screenwriter: Nina Paley
Cast: Annette Hanshaw, Aseem Chhabra, Manish Acharya, Bhavana Nagulapally, Reena Shah

This Film Shows as part of the Celestial Cinema Thursday program, screening order for this program is as follows:

7:30 Special Musical Surprise
8:00pm Rock Prophecies
10:00pm Art Officially Favored
11:00pm Sita Sings the Blues

A Hindu goddess rises from the sea like Aphrodite—all done in animation of course because you can't actually film a goddess. Glittering and beautiful, she is Sita, the devoted wife of Rama, who is the hero of the 3,000-year-old Hindu epic tale Ramayana.
During the course of the ensuing story Sita will be banished to the forest, kidnapped, threatened with rape, condemned to execution, rescued, rejected, forced to die, rescued again, rejected, impregnated, rejected again, then finally forced to die again, and of course she triumphantly survives. That pretty much sums up the plot.
    Every time Sita hits a bad point in the plot, she sings. She sings an exact replication of an original recording by Annette Hanshaw, a smooth-voiced jazz singer from the Bessie Smith / Ethel Waters era, the Twenties. Whenever she starts singing, Sita becomes a voluptuous, big-eyed Betty Boop who Bollywood-dances her way through personal crises of mythical scale.
    This entire animated film was made on a personal computer by syndicated cartoonist Nina Paley. There's nothing like it nor will there likely ever be. Paley was going through her own personal crisis—rejected by her husband—while making this film. She includes an apparently autobiographical story within the whole array of Indian extravagance, and that story helps us understand the spectacular and peculiar vision of this film. Using galactic cosmology, it captures the tragedy of being a woman.
    When a cartoonist starts singing the blues, you just don't know whether to laugh or cry.
"You can actually feel how much time went into it," said Alison Dickey, a film producer and one of the jurors who nominated Paley for Film Independent's Someone to Watch honor. "We see so many films, and when you come across one like this, you just feel that you've stumbled across a gem."
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com

Not yet MPAA rated
This film is included on the Celestial Cinema Thursday ticket.
For ticketing information please phone 808-579-9244 or email boxoffice@mauifilmfestival.com


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