iNDICA NEWS BUREAU-
The 21st Annual San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival – Beyond Bollywood will be hosted by 3rdi to showcase edgy narratives, fun indie films, and inspiring documentaries from South Asia and its diaspora, including stories from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, France, Italy, UK, Canada and the USA from October 20-22.
The festival’s opening night at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco puts the spotlight on Freedoms with the riveting and essential film, While We Watched (India, 2022), directed by 3rdi alum Vinay Shukla, an award-winning documentary. The film captures the state of contemporary news media with a powerful character study of Ravish Kumar, a prime-time Indian TV news anchor and journalist, and his quest to speak the truth, to hold power to account, and to persevere against the normalization of authoritarianism. Although the film is rooted in India, its depiction of how misinformation is eroding fact-based news could apply to many countries.
The festival features narratives like Agra (India/France, 2023) an arthouse film by 3rdi alum Kanu Behl, which opened to rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival, audaciously explores sexual repression through vivid sexual imagery and examines how patriarchy, Indian family dynamics and the lack of physical space, in a country of over a billion, affects the way people live their lives. The film tells the story of Guru, a young call center worker, who tries to move his fiancée into the family home, but nothing goes as planned.
Representing Pakistan in the features lineup is the groundbreaking Joyland by Saim Sadiq (Pakistan, 2023), the first from its country to make the shortlist of the Academy Awards, Best International Feature. Other accolades include Cannes Jury Prize and the Queer Palm Prize. The visually gorgeous and subversive family drama, set in the bustling megacity of Lahore, is both funny and deeply poignant. Pressured to earn his own salary, a soft-spoken house husband joins an erotic dance show, and finds himself attracted to an irrepressible trans woman. This striking feature upends traditional gender roles and identities through a story of complex expressions of love.
Women filmmakers take the lead this year with inspiring and illuminating documentaries. Multi-award-winning filmmaker Nishtha Jain returns to the festival with The Golden Thread (India/Netherlands 2022), a visually spectacular and symphonic ode to manual labor and the jute factories of West Bengal, India. The documentary’s long shots draw the audience into the world of the golden fiber, the world of steam and sweat, and the rhythms of the century-old machines.
In Bangla Surf Girls, first-time Bangladeshi filmmaker Elizabeth D. Costa takes us into the heart of Cox’s Bazar, a beach town in Bangladesh, where we witness the transformation of young girls who join a local surf club and dream of freedom from traditional expectations. Balancing the freedom of the waves with the restrictive realities of their circumstances, the film showcases the thrill and struggle of coming of age.
A Cannes Film Festival winner for best documentary, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (India/France, 2021) is a brilliant, dreamlike, poetic exploration of the political and social changes occurring in India. In the story, narrated through a series of letters, a young female student reads aloud to an absent lover, and is accompanied by a variety of documentary images and an evocative music score. It’s an astonishing fragmentary work that witnesses India’s resurgent extreme nationalism.
The film festival will also screen Shalini Kantayya ’s rigorous, sharp and exploratory TikTok, Boom (USA, 2021) that balances a genuine interest in the TikTok community with a healthy skepticism around the security issues, global political challenges, and racial biases behind the platform. A cast of Gen Z subjects is centered, making this one of the most needed and empathic films exploring what it means to be a digital native.
Another presentation will be a light-hearted comedy, Amit Ashraf’s Kathal (Bangladesh, 2022). The film is a quirky and enjoyable comedy. Two kids from the wrong side of the tracks sneak into a posh gated community to try and steal the world’s largest jackfruit, and are forced to try to sell it to the eccentric residents. What started as a simple playful heist turns into an adventure that tests their friendship. A short film Dos Bros Force by Jyothi Kalyan Sura (USA, 2022) precedes it, an adorable and loving tale set in Los Angeles, 1996, about the Sura family, a financially struggling Indian immigrant household.
To add to the glitter and entertainment of the film festival, local talents will enthrall the audience in “3rdi Shorts: From Mumbai to the Mission”, which presents California filmmakers in conversation with filmmakers from South Asia and the Diaspora. The Voices of Women program highlights short-form documentaries to dramatic narratives, in genres ranging from Sci-Fi to comedy to horror. This year’s edition tackles stories of relationships, identity, and social justice.
