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FILMS TO BE SCREENED:
(1992)
To Serve One's Country
(2000)
The To-Do List Confessions
(1993)
Distant Souls
(2002)
Gold, Greed and Genocide (photo courtesy of Pratap Chatterjee/Lighthawk)
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Film > Press
Release (June 23, 2003)
Locus
1640 Presents: Beyond Bollywood: Words and Visions - Press Release, Details, Artist Bios South
Asian Roots, Contemporary Thoughts -
ESSAY & PHOTOS (271K)
SAN
FRANCISCO, California - Locus
1640 presents: Beyond Bollywood: Words
and Visions. Featuring award winning writer Debjani Chatterjee, one of
the UK's best-known South Asian poets. An
evening where local artists and visiting luminaries from abroad come together
to exchange ideas in a "salon" type event celebrating a diversity
of art, thought and community from a contemporary south asian-american
perspective. A cultural alternative to the release of Hollywood's Legally
Blonde II. Featured
artists include poet Dharini Abeysekera, artist/filmmaker Kavita Bali,
poet/translator Debjani Chatterjee, filmmaker/radio presenter Pratap Chatterjee,
writer/filmmaker Kirthi Nath and Ravi Chandra. Q & A to follow performances.
Curated and emceed by poet Pireeni Sundaralingam with LOCUS 1640 Post. Wednesday,
July 2, 2003, 7:30pm - 10:00pm. Locus 1640 Post (Between Laguna and Buchanan
in San Francisco) Admission: $5. More Information: www.locusarts.org
and www.urbanpeacock.com Debjani
Chatterjee, an award-winning writer has written or edited over
thirty books for children and adults. Her books include: The Redback Anthology
of British South Asian Poetry, Rainbow World: Poems From Many Cultures
and Generations of Ghazals. She is Chair of the National Association of
Writers in Education, Vice-Chair of Bengali Women's Support Group and
former Chair of the Arts Council of England's Literary Translations Panel.
Asking
about the inspiration behind putting together such an event, curator Pireeni
Sundaralingam replied "The whole thing got started, partly, in response
to the fact that various internationally celebrated South Asian artists
(such as poet and translator Debjani Chatterjee) would be flying in to
California to be part of an Arts festival in Los Angeles. We ended up
choosing the theme of the night "Beyond Bollywood: Words and Visions"
because although the Bollywood phenomenon has reached the furthest corners
of the globe, there is so much more than that to the words and images
of the South Asian community in diaspora. " Pratap
Chatterjee is a freelance investigative environmental
journalist, a producer at KPFA radio in Berkeley and is deeply involved
in the San Francisco Bay area's Asian Pacific Islander political and spoken
word scene. He helps host APEX Express, a weekly API radio show, produces
Mango Mic, a weekly Asian API open mic and is involved with Locus, an
API arts space in Japantown. He is also a board member of the Asian Pacific
Environmental Network. Kirthi
Nath is a writer, filmmaker, educator and
curator. Her writings and films reveal her intrigue with questions of
the self, boundaries, memory and desire, and how this cross-sects with
the sensual experience of a moment. Her writings have appeared in several
publications, including Interlope and the Berkeley Poetry Review. Her
films have shown in several festivals including Moondance, SFIAAF and
various Ladyfests. She completed her MFA at UCSD and currently lives in
S.F. KN likes masking tape, ladybugs and swimming. Kavita
Bali, founder and creative director of UrbanPeacock.com
moved to the US from Allahabad, India at the age of six in 1971. An intermedia
artist working in film,
design, visual arts, experimental performance and poetry, she's been involved
in the creation of art for over 20 years. Her films include: Birth of
a Butterfly, Distant Souls, Namaste Papaji, and To Serve One's Country.
She has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, studied Photography
& Product Development at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland
and Filmmaking at NYU's Graduate Film Program. A strong advocate for the
universality of the arts, Kavita is currently compiling a manuscript of
her work titled 'Urban Peacock Tales' while working as an independent
User Interface and visual design consultant in Silicon Valley. Dharini
Abeysekera, a Sri-Lankan poet has written
'Songs about Women's Issues' a series of 4 poems, part of the publication
'Making Connections'. This collection of work serves as a literary and
EAL curriculum from a feminist perspective geared for all audiences, addressing
the most pressing issues of women's lives as a means for greater unity
and understanding. Since childhood, writing has been an important and
productive outlet for Dharini Abeysekera. She pursued linguistics and
English as a Second language believing that making the "language
of power" more accessible to everyone was a practical step to take
towards social change. Two children and two countries later she is working
on developing a style that incorporates both poetry and prose as a medium
to express her diverse experiences and observations. Ravi
Chandra is a psychiatry resident at UCSF,
who brings interests in psychodynamics, biology, culture, film and literature
to his work and life outside work. He was born in South India and raised
in all four corners of the United States. Pireeni
Sundaralingam, the curator for the evening
salon was born in Sri Lanka and is currently a resident of San Francisco,
Pireeni is co-editor of 'Writing
the Lines of Our Hands' the first anthology of South Asian America
poetry. Her work focuses on issues of exile and repatriation and has been
featured in several anthologies, including 'The Oxford and Cambridge Anthology
of Poetry' and 'So Luminous the Wildflowers: An Anthology of Californian
Poetry' (Tebot Bach 2003). She was awarded the Rosenthal Fellowship in
Poetry by PEN USA in 2003 and a Potrero Nuevo Fund Prize for her collaborative
compositions with violinist Colm O'Riain. LOCUS is an all-volunteer organization of Asian American artists and arts supporters dedicated to promoting community and consciousness through the arts. Locus 1640 Post seeks to nurture and cultivate young emerging APA artists by providing a physical space to develop, rehearse, perform and display their works, bringing together many different elements of the Bay Area's vast Asian community (www.locusarts.org). To learn more about Kavita and her art, please visit: (http://www.urbanpeacock.com) Publicity by UrbanPeacock.com |
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Digital Painting by Kavita Bali. Photo of Pireeni by Suzanne Pullen. |
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