Slant Film Festival

Neelanjana Banerjee and Robin Sukhadia will perform neo-benshi at Slant. Photo by John C. Liau.

We are super excited to bring performances to Slant this year. Bay Area artists Neelanjana Banerjee and Robin Sukhadia (pictured above) will be performing their hilarious take on neo-benshi. Focusing on Bollywood’s Golden Era, they’ve written their own scripts and soundtracks to film clips starring the megastar Amitabh Bachchan, which they’ll be performing live.

Neela is a writer and editor who also has a new book. She co-edited Indivisible: Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Robin, who puts a modern spin on his classical tabla training, is also known as DJ TablaPusher.

Neela and Robin go on at 7 this Saturday at Super Happy Fun Land. Tickets are just $7 (and free for Aurora Picture Show members.) More details about Slant 10: The Neo-Benshi Experience here.

Following their performance will be singer songwriter Goh Nakamura. Goh will be performing a live score to a new animation by Dino Ignacio, as well as playing his own songs. “Armed with an acoustic guitar and an active imagination, Goh Nakamura strums to the beat of a processed drum machine, singing the minimum wage, dial-up connection blues,” says Hyphen magazine. “Like Neil Finn gone broke or a male version of Mary Lou Lord, Nakamura could be a patron saint for lonely code warriors with good record collections. Geekdom doesn’t get any more pronounced than on ‘N.P.’, a wistful stalker anthem about a girl in a Star Wars trilogy.”

Goh’s got lots of videos on YouTube if you want a preview of Saturday’s show.
Here’s his cover of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.”

Unlocked plays Friday at Slant. As you can see, there’s a little bit of everything in it. It has bikes, a foot chase with law enforcement, and one little mother with a big, big temper. The film marks the film-directing debut of Mio Adilman.

Mio, though, is no stranger to making films. He has collaborated as a writer and actor with his brother Nobu Adilman on many films, all of which have screeened at Slant.

Mio is also known as a TV and radio personality in Canada. He appears on CBC Radio One’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi where he gives the weekly internet report, the Download Down-Lo and is perhaps best known for his recurring appearance in season five of Trailer Park Boys.

Fine Threads by Adele Pham

One of the films we’re showing this Friday is the documentary Fine Threads. Made by filmmaker Adele Pham — along with girls who participate in Desi Girls on ‘da Rise, a youth leadership program of the community organization South Asian Youth Action — this short film presents a portrait of what it’s like to be an immigrant teenage girl in Queens, New York.

Fine Threads weaves a narrative from interviews with three South Asian American teens. The teens — Humira Khan (pictured above), Damandeep “Daman” Kaur, and Shweta Pariya — talk about beauty, religion, parents, identity, and migration.

Humira Khan, 14,  is a Bangladeshi American Muslim girl who loves to incorporate colorful fashion with wearing her hijab. Damandeep “Daman” Kaur, 17, is a Punjabi American Sikh teenager who talks about conflicts between her parents’ ideas of womanhood and hers. And Shweta Pariya, 15, loves her life in New York, which gives her more freedom than she had in India.

Fine Threads plays this Friday at Super Happy Fun Land as part of our shorts program. Get your tickets here.

But if you must miss it, the documentary will also play on HBO this month for Asian American Heritage Month!

Three Times Me

At Slant, we love short films. That’s why we focus exclusively on them. We are delighted by how a story can unfold in just 10 or 20 minutes. Or how you can get a good glimpse of someone’s life in a brief documentary. Or experience something new in just 5 minutes!

The shortest film we’ve ever shown was just a minute long. In Jenn Kao’s The Plug, a young woman makes a surprising discovery about the world.

This year, most of the films we’re screening are around the 15-minute mark. But we have one super short one. Wendy J. N. Lee’s work, Three Times Me, is just 3 minutes long. This charming story takes us into the imagination of a little girl hiding under a table at a dinner party.

Watch an interview with Wendy about making Three Times Me below. At 2 minutes and 37 seconds, it’s almost as long as her film!

Televisnu

Prithi Gowda’s Televisnu just screened at SXSW in March. We’re pleased to bring this surreal story of a call center worker who falls into a dreamland of wires and memories to Slant. New York-based Prithi says she was inspired to make the film after a trip to India a few years ago.

“I noticed a big change. Many of my young, female cousins were working rather than adopting the more traditional and expected role of husband hunting,” she says. “In the past, a young Indian woman did not leave her home until a suitable man agreed to marry her. She went directly from the care and responsibility of her father to the care and responsibility of her new husband. But, due to globalization, a new and curious detour has become more common.”

Televisnu was shot over 12 days in Bangalore, India and in Prithi’s parents’ respective villages outside Kolar. It was a labor of love for the filmmaker and her family. Her uncle served as a location scout, her mother co-produced the film, and her cousin built all the sets. Watch the trailer, then see the film on May 21 at Slant.