3RD I 2009—Michael Hawley Previews the Line-up

How fortunate can a website be to have two of the Bay Area's best film writers offer previews of what I consider to be this weekend's winner of—as Michael Hawley aptly terms it—November's "filmfest smackdown." Film festivalism has never been more athletic or competitive!! Lay your bets, cinephiles!

The 3rd i San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival returns for its seventh edition November 5 to 8, with two nights apiece at the Roxie and Castro Theaters. Sure to be a highlight is Saturday's Castro revival of legendary producer/star Guru Dutt's 1960 Bollywood classic Full Moon (Chaudhvin Ka Chand). Set amongst the Muslim aristocracy of early 20th century Lucknow, this lushly photographed film follows a love triangle beset with comic misunderstanding, mistaken identity and ultimate tragedy. Any disappointment I had over the film's digital, rather the 35mm presentation, has been tempered with the announcement that Dutt's son Aran will be on hand to introduce the screening.

That night, 3rd i's Saturday at the Castro concludes with recent Bollywood hit My Heart Goes Hooray! (Kil Bole Hadippa!). Although this girls-just-wanna-play-cricket pic doesn't star Shahrukh Khan, I'm not exactly dreading 148 minutes of watching Shahid Kapoor (Rani Mukherjee in Drag King mode might be a different story).

And anyone with a taste for the wildly different won't want to miss Friday's late-night Roxie screening of Quick Gun Murugun. This ambitious masala mish-mash pits a gaily-garbed vegetarian caballero against a criminal carnivore—while spoofing vintage Bollywood, Spaghetti Westerns and a hundred other things. Expect a lot of cartoonish violence, special FX and in-jokes infinitum (plus a color-palate influenced by Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger).

There are several non-Bollywood narrative features in the line-up. Of the two I previewed I'm most enthusiastic about Bombay Summer. This moody, hang-loose Indian indie chronicles the evolving friendship between three Mumbai 20-somethings—Geeta, a graphic design company exec who still lives at home, Jaider, her coddled poet boyfriend, and Madan, a drug deliveryman and photographer who comes between them. In the dark, uneven British anti-family comedy Mad, Sad & Bad, three damaged adult siblings stumble through the weeks leading up to the death of their widowed, alcoholic mother. A 17-year-old Kashmiri boy's struggle to escape his fate is at the center of Bay Area director Tariq Tapa's neo-realist feature debut Zero Bridge. The film was just recently nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. The directors for all three of these films are expected to attend.

3rd i can be counted on to present some terrific documentaries, and this year is no exception. While I haven't previewed it, closing night film Yes Madam, Sir appears to be one not to miss. The film is about Kiran Bedi, India's first elite policewoman, and Variety's Richard Kuipers calls it "an enthralling chronicle of her brilliant, tempestuous career" in a full-on rave review. Both Kiran Bedi and the film's director, Megan Doneman, are scheduled to attend.

Of the three docs I've seen, I most strongly recommend Opening Night film Supermen of Malegaon, a charming story of cinema-obsessed textile mill workers making their own inspired version of Superman. Anyone who was blown away by Manufactured Landscapes' unearthly images of Bangladesh's "ship-breaking" industry will want to check out Iron Eaters, a sobering, multi-angled look at a back-breaking business that feeds an estimated three million Bangladeshis. The contradictory disconnect between "Kama Sutra India" and "no public kissing India" is the fascinating subject of Kaushik Mukherjee's brave documentary Love in India. Other docs in the fest include Warrior Boyz (South Asian gangs in Vancouver), Searching for Sandeep (Australian lesbian finds romance on-line) and Children of the Pyre (kids living off Varanasi's cremation industry).

Cross-published on Twitch.

3RD I 2009—Frako Loden Previews the Line-up

All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray. November is here, and so is the most excellent 3rd i, or the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival. In its seventh year, 3rd i has become one of the must-go film festivals in the Bay Area, where you can catch up with outstanding selections from the "shorts, documentaries, and feature films from South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora, including India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Australia, Canada, Germany, UK and the USA." The great strength of this festival is its generous attention to independent works, while including classics and crowd-pleasing Bollywood, in an era when only the latter will guarantee a full house at the Castro Theatre. The festival opens at the Roxie Theater Thursday and Friday, November 5-6, then moves to the Castro through the weekend of November 7-8.

This year in previewing the festival I suspect I missed out on the crowd pleasers, which at any rate I hope to see on a bigger screen. I did see a number of documentaries—which tend to be my favorite—that I would enthusiastically recommend. I wasn't able to screen Yes Madam, Sir, whose topic—India's first policewoman—fascinated me. And I'm saving the 1960 classic Full Moon (Chaudhvin ka Chand), starring the legendary Guru Dutt, for the Castro screening on Saturday noon.

Supermen of Malegaon (India: Faiza Ahmad Khan, 2007)—In the textile town of Malegaon northeast of Mumbai, when the power looms screech to a halt and the moviegoers mass around the iron gates of the movie theater, the theater staff unlock the gates and leap out of the way as a tsunami of spectators flood in for the first Friday screening. In this movie-mad town you can get a Shahrukh Khan haircut for 101 rupees, while a Sanjay Dutt cut costs 151 rupees because there's "more hair at the back." The Muslim majority of the town makes the films in this "Mollywood" of video parlors, homemade sequels and movie parodies. Shaikh Nasir, owner of a clothing store that used to be a video parlor, recalls his no-budget local-dialect parody of Sholay that was a huge success in Malegaon. This breezy, hilarious film documents the pre-production and shooting phases of his latest work, a localized parody of Superman. Two guys under the green-screen sheet hold up the super-skinny, horizontal Shafique in his baggy Superman costume as he mimes flying through the air, fists shooting out before him. Like any Bollywood star, he's got a busy personal life: he drops a bomb on his director by letting his wedding rituals interfere with the shooting schedule. The small-pond diva complains that Malegaon's bad water cakes up her makeup and keeps the crew waiting as she chats on her cell phone. The camera falls into the river and has to be repaired in Indore.

At the end a few clips from the finished product Superman of Malegaon leave you wishing for more from this homegrown film industry. Slake your parody-thirst with the late-night screening of Quick Gun Murugun: Misadventures of an Indian Cowboy (India: Shashank Ghosh, 2009), which promises a bigger-budget, time-traveling Tamil take on the "sambar Western" that has been necessitating extra screenings at film festivals around the world.

Warrior Boyz (Canada: Baljit Sangra, 2008)—In trying to account for the distressing one hundred-plus death toll among young Punjabi/Sikh men due to gang violence in the Vancouver area, the filmmaker talks to three survivors—15-year-old Tanvir, 18-year-old Vicky and ex-con Jagdeep. In a few minutes we become surrogate parents of the most vulnerable Tanvir, kicked out of school and his family for holding firearms and drugs, seeking role models in all the wrong places, forced to carry a bat that his father thinks is for baseball. Subtitles make intelligible his mumbling, but not his strained rationalizations for earning respect among thugs who use him to sell drugs. The seen-it-all, politically aware Jagdeep provides the ethnic subtext of the violence: the need to stand up against the systemic racism and xenophobia aimed at South Asians, and the young men's out-of-context perverting of their own origins as Sikh soldier-saints obliged to fight in the service of humanity. Director Baljit Sangra is scheduled to attend the screening and, it's hoped, update us on better news about Tanvir's prospects for a decent life.

Iron Eaters (Bangladesh/Germany: Shaheen Dill-Riaz, 2008)—A decent life is the least of a laborer's challenges in this amazing documentary, shot in the Bangladeshi seaport of Chittagong, where the coastline provides an ideal location for the grounding of huge ships destined to be painstakingly taken apart by manual laborers. These workers are men, some young teenagers, forced out of their rice-farmer occupations up north to engage in a job that is potentially lethal in literally every step they take (without shoes): pulling heavy cables to shore in foot-deep mud among rusting steel plates, breaking up metal with primitive tools, and exposing oneself to fire, flying debris and falls from great heights—and perhaps worst of all, not being paid for it. While the spectacular long shots of behemoth vessels dwarfing the ant-like laborers inspire awe, the day-to-day negotiations of work leaders with middlemen and company owners simply to get paid provoke outrage on behalf of these likable yet desperate working men.

Searching For Sandeep (Australia: Poppy Stockell, 2007)—The boyish Poppy, a white lesbian in Sydney, decides to find a girlfriend online. In short order she's chatting with, and falling for, Sandeep, an Anglo-Indian woman who is sure she's a lesbian but has had no experience, never had an orgasm and hasn't come out to anyone—not even her four sisters and certainly not her conservative parents. (A holy man bewilders Sandeep's deep-in-denial mother by saying that her daughter is "with someone.") Still, Poppy reasons, there must be something between two women who both want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and love to eat saag paneer. Through the well-worn technique of closet (literal as well as figurative in Sandeep's case) video diaries, we ride along as the budding couple negotiate their first physical meeting on holiday in Thailand, the inevitable lonely return to their separate countries, and Poppy's risky decision to relocate to London to be closer to the woman she loves. In the meantime Sandeep's sisters peek at her text messages and confirm that she's gay. Anticipation, even dread, mount as the time comes for Poppy to meet Sandeep's reluctant parents, at which point we're thoroughly invested in the success of this romance. There's something deeply real about a mother who can't commit to visiting (and therefore acknowledging) the couple in their home, but who gives them plenty of mango pickle as a sour blessing.

Mad, Sad & Bad (UK: Avie Luthra, 2008)—I have to say this film was underwhelming despite my eager anticipation to see another Avie Luthra production. It's a "quirky" comedy about three Anglo-Indian siblings and their alcoholic drama queen of a mother, whose voiceover narration opens the film as she lies in her coffin ("definitely a low point"). We're sent back to a time before her death when her three grown children are struggling with problems in their relationships. Mum adores her elder son the psychiatrist despite his being a vicious, sex-addicted jerk. She disdains her younger son, a mediocre cable-TV "shitcom" writer who aspires to opera. And she torments her fortysomething single daughter, who yearns for a child without the necessary intermediate steps of moving out of the house and starting a relationship with a man. In the weeks before Mum's death the siblings experience rejection (even by a dating service), breakups, awkward meals, embarrassing interrogations and cheese epiphanies. I found the musical score too conspicuous and cheery, the characters too morose to warrant interest, and the storylines flat and straining for humor. In the role of the opportunistic wife of a rich undertaker, Ayesha Dharker, the eponymous heroine in Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist (1999), steals every scene she's in just by widening her eyes. I do like how Mum justifies throwing her daughter out of the house: "When I was your age I had a home of my own, three children and a husband who drank too much. You don't get that with spoonfeeding." But while that punchline instantly brings color to its character, other lines promise much and fail to deliver.

Children of the Pyre (India: Rajesh S. Jala, 2008)—Of the films I had a chance to sample, this one commanded the most fascination with its subject matter and manner of treatment. Winner of best documentary awards at Montreal and Sao Paulo 2008, Rajesh S. Jala's astonishingly beautiful film is set at the Manikarnika cremation ground in Varanasi, the oldest, busiest and most sacred cremation site in India. As many as 150 corpses are reduced to bones and ash here every day, in the Hindu belief that the departed soul achieves salvation, or moksha, as a result. The seven boys profiled in the film, ranging in age from 9 to 14, are of the Dom untouchable community whose full-time job—they don't attend school—is to stoke the fires, getting the bodies to burn as expeditiously as possible. Between pokes at the flaming logs, they snatch away the colorful burial shrouds to sell and pocket the proceeds. Despite their playful and callous demeanor, these kids are desperately trying to make a living in harrowing conditions: surrounded by charred corpses and accustomed to the stench and smoke of burning flesh and unending hours of 100-degree-plus temperatures. Unlike other kids, when they wake from a nightmare they're still surrounded by cadavers. The older workers yell at them and treat them no differently from the stray dogs that hang around the site. Some of their fathers are drunken abusers.

Don't let the disclaimer about "disturbing images" make you leave your seat or, God forbid, not show up at all. The burning bodies are insensate, and they're treated for the most part with respect. If you keep in mind that they're only shells being burned off for their souls to take flight, the horror abates. There are even moments of transcendence like those I've found in fictional films like The Harp of Burma and Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left For the East? The ethereally lovely song "Ud Jayega" that closes the film put me in a kind of tearful ecstasy that stayed with me for hours. But the horror that remains is the lives of these children, who endure with the help of thick skins, ganja, gutka (a chewing tobacco containing betelnut) and gallows humor. There happens to be a dance sequence near the end in which one of the boys shows surprising skill, but there's no Slumdog Millionaire-style happy ending in store for these kids.

Cross-published on Twitch. For more information and tickets, go to 3rd i's website.

INDIAN SILENT CINEMA—3rd i's "Snakes, Sirens & Vamps: A Short History of Early Indian Cinema"

One of the spectatorial pleasures of K.M. Madhusudanan's Bioscope (2008) was its revelatory glimpse into Indian Cinema's silent film corpus, by way of Dadasaheb Phalke's 1918 Hindi "mythological" Shri Krishna Janma (Birth of Lord Krishna). Bioscope screened at the 2008 3rd i South Asian Independent Film Festival, where I wrote it up, and initiated a volley of emails between myself, New Delhi journalist Jai Arjun Singh (Jabberwock), and Anuj Vaidya, Associate Festival Director for 3rd i, anticipating a seminar on the history of Indian Silent Cinema. Short of a year later, that seminar has finally arrived.

This coming Friday, July 24, 2009, 3rd I and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will co-present a lecture by Anupama Kapse: "Snakes, Sirens and Vamps: A Short History of Early Indian Cinema." Kapse's lecture, illustrated with clips, and with live musical accompaniment by Robin Sukhadia for select clips, will provide a welcome opportunity "to see rare excerpts from some of the earliest films from the subcontinent, including: Kaliya Mardan (1919), by India's film pioneer D.G. Phalke, about the exploits of a young Krishna; Gallant Hearts (1931), 'a fast and furious comedy-action-adventure film, filled with court intrigues, rowdy sword fights, and fantastic locations', modeled after The Thief of Baghdad (1924); films from the legendary Bombay Talkies studio; and early sound films like Achut Kanya (1936) and Aadmi (1939)."

Anupama Kapse will provide an introduction to each film, and lead her audience through a short history of early Indian cinema, from the silent era into the arrival of sound on the Indian filmscape. All films will be presented in a digital format; since most of these films have not been restored, and the quality of some of the clips duly reflect the archival nature of the prints.

Kapse's doctoral thesis, The Moving Image: Melodrama and Early Cinema in India, 1913-1939, examines the genres of Indian silent cinema through a melodramatic lens. She is currently co-editing a collection of essays, Border Crossings: Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (with Jennifer Bean and Laura Horak, forthcoming Indiana University Press), inspired by last Spring's UC Berkeley symposium "Border Crossings: Rethinking Silent Cinema." Prior to joining the PhD. program in film studies at UC Berkeley, Kapse taught at Gargi College, University of Delhi, India, where she was Assistant Professor of English. She has lectured widely on silent cinema in India and works on film history, gender and the visual culture of "Bollywood." This fall, she will be joining Queens College as Assistant Professor in media studies.

Bollywood film music fanatic Robin Sukhadia completed his Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts. He has been studying tabla under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri at CalArts and the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California for the past seven years. His special focus on the musical traditions and rhythms of South Asia informs his approach to musical arrangement and composition on a wide range of concert, film and album productions. For the past five years, Robin has traveled internationally on behalf of Project Ahimsa, an organization committed to empowering impoverished youth through music education. In 2008, Robin presented a three-part talk, "Bollywood Sound & Image: A discussion with Robin Sukhadia", as part of 3rd i's ongoing Speaker Series.

"Snakes, Sirens and Vamps: A Short History of Early Indian Cinema" will take place Friday, July 24, 2009, at the Mission Cultural Center (2868 Mission Street); $8-$10 (tickets at the door only).

Cross-published on Twitch.

3rd i 2008—BIOSCOPE

"Look at that mountain; once it was fire."—Paul Cezanne.

Augmenting her Film International article on plein-air screenings—"Screenings By Moonlight"—Kay Armatage's sidebar essay on "Travelling Projectionist Films" provides an insightful accent on the recent Castro Theatre screening of K.M. Madhusudanan's 2008 Bioscope, which Frako Loden earlier characterized as the "revelation" of this year's 3rd i Film Festival, and which could easily be added to Armatage's survey of films reflecting the theme of travelling projectionists; a survey in which Armatage includes narrative features The Picture Show Man (John Power, Australia, 1977), Battu's Bioscope / Cinéma itinerant—Rêves et illusions (Andrej Fidyk, Poland, 1998), Wind with the Gone / El Viento se llevó lo qué (Alejandro Agresti, Argentina, 1998), Ticket to Jerusalem (Rashid Masharawi, Netherlands/Palestine/ France/Australia, 2002), and Electric Shadows / Meng ying tong nian (Jiang Xiao, China, 2004), and the short film contributions Zhanxiou Village (Chen Kaige) and En Regardant le Film (Jhang Yimou) to the 2007 portmanteau Chacun son cinema, as well as Tombee de nuit a Shanghai / Night Falling in Shanghai, Chantal Akerman's contribution to the 2007 Portuguese omnibus State of the World. Another worthy entry to this survey would be Brazilian director Marcelo Gomes' 2005 Cinema, Aspirin and Vultures (Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus).

As Frako Loden synopsized in her Evening Class preview of Bioscope, winner of this year's NETPAC jury award for best Asian film at Osian's Cinefan Asian and Arab Film Festival: "[T]his parable set in 1920s Kerala explores the hypnotic effect of the recorded moving image: while evoking a distant (un)holy memory, it pronounces a curse and steals the soul. A poor Indian inherits a Bioscope crank-operated movie projector from a Frenchman which he takes around to villages showing Western films and the earliest Hindi 'mythologicals' (such as the 1918 Birth of Lord Krishna). His wife lies mysteriously ill, harassed by the recurring image of a white man shipwrecked on a beach. Meanwhile those bewildered villagers not entranced by scenes from Lumière, Caligari and Griffith begin grumbling about the evil box trapping the ghosts of dead white men. Bioscope's dreamlike images removed from their context and sound design themselves call forth memories of such visionary works as Aguirre, Wrath of God and Colossal Youth, which also sleepwalk us through troubled dreams and memories of colonialism."

Kay Armatage characterizes this category of films: "These films often tend to set their bucolic cinematic fantasies against a backdrop of the bad and yet somehow nostalgic old days of rural isolation, economic deprivation and political penury. Yet lurking beneath the romantic travelling projectionists that inhabit them is another history of multiple contradictions that come along with these open-air screenings, a history of economic expansion and governmentality." (Film International, 2008, 6:4, p. 41.) As she further observes, "Nostalgia for the arrival of cinema in the rural hinterland is a frequent note in films which … reflect the lost past of cinematic virginity; the spectacle of electrification literally illuminates them, as travelling projectionists carried their generators with them to outback areas." (Ibid.)

Of gendered distinction to Andrej Fidyk's Battu's Bioscope, whose narrative likewise tracks the introduction of cinema to rural Indian populations—wherein scenes of Bollywood films show men savagely brutalizing women, inducing terror on the faces of the rural women in the audience—the audiences in K. M. Madhusudanan's Bioscope are notably male, though equally horrified at the questions raised by "the spectacle of electrification." Met with equal parts fascination and fear, the flickering images of Lumière shorts and German expressionism, as well as Dadasaheb Phalke's Shri Krishna Janma (Birth of Lord Krishna, 1918) depict—as Lucy Laird writes in her festival program capsule—"a more innocent world, a more innocent vision, beset by superstition, but on the verge of modernity." The glimpse of Krishna defeating the Nāga Kaliya in Phalke's silent film is especially enticing. As one of the villagers murmurs in as befitting a definition of cinema as any: "All this is an illusion. But the story is true." Phalke is considered the Father of Indian cinema and Bioscope provides my first exposure to his work; a revelation indeed. This revelatory cinematic historicity is precisely Bioscope's most sterling contribution.

Jai Arjun Singh ("Jabberwock") eloquently writes at the remarkably informative site Ultrabrown (I've long been looking for a site on Indian cinema and this one satisfies fully): "Bioscope is a languorously paced film with a lot of recurring imagery, notably a beautifully shot slow-motion scene—taken from a woman's feverish nightmares—that shows the bloated corpse of a white man being washed up on a shore and carried away by three fishermen. There's something appropriate about the slow pace, because what we're seeing here is an elegiac tribute to a world that is on the verge of being altered forever—we can see that modernity is about to impinge on this setting, that permanent change is on the horizon, and the film seems simultaneously excited and saddened by the prospect, looking ahead to the future but also reluctant to leave the present behind."

As Anuj Vaidya, Associate Festival Director for 3rd i, has intimated, many of the original silent films from India are in "a tattered condition" lacking the funds for necessary restoration. The National Film Archive of India—whose stated mission is "to safeguard the heritage of Indian Cinema for posterity"—wasn't even initiated until 1964, by which time they had already lost over 50% of India's silent cinema heritage. The Evening Class anticipates a seminar 3rd i will be conducting in the spring on the history of Indian Silent Cinema.

Cross-published on Twitch.

3rd i 2008—Frako Loden Previews the Line-up

I'm looking at the schedule for the 6th annual 3rd i (as in "eye") San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival, starting this Thursday November 13. The festival kicks off Thursday evening at the Brava Theater, continuing there Friday evening, and moves to the Castro for longer programs over the weekend. I'm reviewing nine and a half of the fifteen offerings to see what I would choose if I had only one full consecutive day and night to devote to it. Don't get me wrong—I personally think it's worth following around all weekend, but most people have non-festival lives to lead and errands to run.

What makes both Saturday and Sunday long but rewarding slogs is the excellence of their morning films. (My thinking is, if you're at the Castro for an 11:30AM screening, why not stay the entire day and night?) Saturday's is the lovely 1929 silent film A Throw of Dice (Pranpancha Pash), directed by German director Franz Osten, who made Hindi films with Bombay Talkies producer (and Dice villain) Himanshu Rai. Osten/Rai's previous works Prem Sanyas (1925) and Shiraz (1928) have been shown at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Dice, a UK-India-Germany co-production that predates Bombay Talkies, dramatizes episodes from the Mahābhārata in which gambling junkie King Ranjit loses his kingdom and fiancée in a crooked wager instigated by a jealous rival. When Ranjit's loyal vassals learn of the cheat dice, they storm the vast deserts and majestic forts of Rajasthan (where the film was shot) in epic numbers.

Dice's 2006 restoration and re-release is graced by a superb, dreamy score by British-Indian composer/musician Nitin Sawhney that perfectly fits the mixed-blood origins of this production. An open-air screening at London's Trafalgar Square in August 2007 drew an audience of 10,000 to see this production, which forgoes hyper-Orientalist stereotyping in favor of a lyrical and romantic pictorialism. A tiny pet deer prancing around the heroine's room is unutterably charming. I wished some of the spectacular long shots were held much longer to allow contemplating all the lavish detail—fabulous Rajput costumes and headdresses, elephants and camels and palace interiors. The action sequences are dynamic enough that I would gladly have sat admiring the décor during narrative breaks.

Saturday's midday screening, Nishtha Jain's Lakshmi and Me, is a slight letdown after the director's profound and brilliant 2005 documentary City of Photos, about urban photography studios mainly in Kolkata. But her good intentions are undeniable and often rewarding in this doc about Jain's relationship with Lakshmi, her maid of five years. A domestic since the age of 10, when the film begins she is working at six different homes for 10 hours a day. Despite the title and perhaps thankfully, the emphasis is more on Lakshmi, a dark-skinned village girl from a large, poor family whose patriarch is more often filmed snoring drunkenly than conscious. When Lakshmi falls in love and then gets pregnant with a young tailor from a caste even lower than hers, the father threatens to take the whole family away from Mumbai—they can't afford living there anyway. As the connections between the two women—employer/employee, filmmaker/subject, "white"/"black" and finally friends—inevitably blur, Jain takes her camera along on prenatal exams, domestics' organization meetings and tense scenes of family discord. Lakshmi and Me raises a number of important issues, both personal and political, that I wish she'd resolved more satisfactorily by the end.

Due to a malfunctioning screener I wasn't able to get beyond the first hour of Vishal Bharadwaj's 2003 Maqbool. But what I saw made me want to finish up this Macbeth adaptation on the Castro screen on Saturday afternoon. Bulbous-eyed Irrfan Khan, who also plays the police inspector in Sunday's Slumdog Millionaire, is the title character, urged against his conscience to assassinate his adoptive father, who also happens to be the reigning Mumbai crime boss. Tabu plays Maqbool's Lady Macbeth (the two played Obama campaigner Kal Penn's parents in The Namesake), the godfather's mistress who is having a passionate affair with Maqbool. The first hour of this tale of vaulting ambition is awash in astrological predictions, corrupted officialdom and sacrificial blood—I hope the second hour is just as full of the direst cruelty.

I haven't seen the Saturday evening screenings, but I'm told they're fun to varying degrees. The 2007 hit Om Shanti Om reunites megastar Shah Rukh Khan and director-choreographer Farah Khan for a romp through 30 years of Bollywood history and a few times as many star cameos. This is the kind of music-and-dance spectacle that sells out seats, draws huge South Asian groups, and turns the Castro into a lively faux-retro-'70s Mumbai theatre for nearly three hours.

Those who manage to get to the end of this evening may resemble the living dead, but at least you won't have trouble identifying with characters in the 2007 Pakistani slasher-zombie film Hell's Ground (Zibahkhana). I'm told that the novelty of its being (according to director Omar Ali Khan) Pakistan's "first modern horror film" attenuates early on, but that its flail-wielding, burqa-veiled psycho butcher provides genuine chills—see Michael Wells' Twitch dispatch from the 2007 New York Asian Film Festival.

At last there's Sunday, which I recommend for the full day-and-night treatment. The first film, which for my money is the revelation of the festival, is K. M. Madhusudanan's 2008 Bioscope. The movie counterpart to Nishtha Jain's documentary City of Photos (which I mention above), this parable set in 1920s Kerala explores the hypnotic effect of the recorded moving image: while evoking a distant (un)holy memory, it pronounces a curse and steals the soul. A poor Indian inherits a Bioscope crank-operated movie projector from a Frenchman which he takes around to villages showing Western films and the earliest Hindi "mythologicals" (such as the 1918 Birth of Lord Krishna). His wife lies mysteriously ill, harassed by the recurring image of a white man shipwrecked on a beach. Meanwhile those bewildered villagers not entranced by scenes from Lumière, Caligari and Griffith begin grumbling about the evil box trapping the ghosts of dead white men. Bioscope's dreamlike images removed from their context and sound design themselves call forth memories of such visionary works as Aguirre, Wrath of God and Colossal Youth, which also sleepwalk us through troubled dreams and memories of colonialism.

Channeling the myths of our past in defiance of the colonialist legacy is a more pragmatic task for the rural child protagonist of the charming King Siri (Siri Raja Siri) from Sri Lankan director Somaratne Dissanayake. Because he got top score in the nation, preteen Sirimal is sent against his will to a city school full of Westernized elites. There he's chosen to play the lead, the ancient King Siri, in a school play. He's clearly the most suited to the role—for a skinny runt he can be imperious—but can't afford the expensive costume, while an ungifted rich boy who longs to play king is scheming to snag the part (with his father attempting bribery). The obvious message—that the countryside produces children who are smarter, more disciplined, healthier, more polite and more attuned to their culture—threatens to make the kid an insufferable prig, but when he starts bawling his eyes out all is forgiven. Parents should bring their children to see this very endearing and often hilarious film.

Not so hilarious—in fact enraging—is the import of Irene Salina's passionate 2007 documentary Flow: For Love of Water. It will make you throw your bottle of Pellegrino water across the room on learning that it's owned by Nestlé, who has diverted water from the public commons and sold it back to the same people at larcenous prices. Not to mention Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Vivendi and Suez. Privatization of water is a major trend in the world of Big Profit, and this well-made film tracks players on different sides of the debate over the global water crisis. Standout advocates are Vandana Shiva and Rajendra Singh.

A more personal and probably more controversial documentary is director Yunus Vally's 2007 The Glow of White Women. Vally grew up black and devoutly Muslim in a sleepy, racist South African town. When he wasn't attending the madressah he was obsessed with magazines filled with images of beautiful white women. When he grew up and moved to the hipster town of Yeoville, he met white women who considered sleeping with a black man to be a blow (so to speak) for political defiance. In the High Fidelity spirit of narcissistic self-examination, Vally puts white girlfriends from his past before the camera to explain his attraction to them and vice versa. As he says in an interview, "As a black man during apartheid, you were accepted as human by having sex with a white woman. It was the one thing that could make you feel equal."

Finally, judging from its climactic place in the program, Slumdog Millionaire is the star of the festival, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) and set in the Mumbai slums. Glitzy, edge-of-your-seat question sessions from host Anil Kapoor during an Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? provide the frame for a picaresque plot explaining how street kid Jamal manages to know all the answers. Jamal is rewarded for his expertise by torture-filled interrogation courtesy of suspicious police inspector Irrfan Khan. The new setting for Boyle seems to have energized his directorial style, boasting headlong virtuoso set-pieces like the "Amitabh scene" that will have you cringing and laughing happily into the Castro Street night.

So which day to go? Make up your own mind; for more info and ticket buying instructions see the festival's website.

Cross-published on Twitch.