October 23, 2008	Thursday	Shawwal 23, 1429

NEW YORK: An Indian tragedy, an American sitar aficionado, and a heroic doctor feature this week in New York’s Asian film festival – with barely a Bollywood dancer in sight.

The South Asian International Film Festival, running from Wednesday to Tuesday, echoes the amazing complexity of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, and also the connectedness of Asia to the rest of the world.

Fifty movies, documentaries and short films set in places as far removed as Mumbai and New York are on tap at the festival, known as SAIFF.

“We’re trying to stretch the boundaries,” said SAIFF programming director Simon Taufique. “Asians are everywhere.”

Proceedings start with “Firaaq,” an acclaimed story set in the aftermath of the horrific 2002 Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in Gujarat.

Director Nandita Das said she is braced for trouble when the film, which has been touring international film festivals, finally opens in India next January.

“There’s a lot of communal tension. We can’t wish it away,” she told journalists in New York on Monday.

“This is not to reignite (tension), it’s to ask questions that we often hesitate to ask.”

Das will also help close the festival on October 28 with her role in “Ramachand Pakistani,” about a woman whose son and husband vanished after straying across the Pakistan-India border.

The film, directed by Pakistan’s Mehreen Jabbar, is based on a true story and seeks to show how much the tense neighbours have in common.

Das conceded she was flirting with controversy in the Gujarat film, but said she had never considered playing the “martyr” by giving up.

“If you believe in it, you do it,” she said. “Do we not want to have a dialogue?”

Of course, this wouldn’t quite be an Asian film festival if there were no all-singing, all-dancing offers from Bollywood.

Fans of leggy actresses and colourful costumes will get their fill in “Fashion,” a depiction of the ruthless fashion industry world, starring the dazzling Priyanka Chopra, and set for world premiere on Friday.

But as Sarah-Jane Dias, last year’s Miss India and now a member of SAIFF’s grand jury, said: “I want to tell (viewers) it’s not just about song and dance.

South Asian film is much more than about that.”

It certainly is.

US sitarist Andrew Mendelson directs “A Cricket in the Court of Akbar,” a documentary about his journey to India in 2003 to study the country’s sacred sitar music with his guru.

He won a competition in Rajasthan and went on to compete in the Tournament of Champions, the Sur Sadak competition.

Mendelson said the film is about how he, an outsider, learned the necessary “humility” to enter deep into this “very ancient world music” and about the complex relationship between the student and teacher.

Another non-Asian director featured at SAIFF is John Walsh, whose documentary “Tibet: Beyond Fear, Holding Fast,” eschews politics and even dialogue to portray a Tibetan refugee camp in Darjeeling, India.

One of the odder documentary entries is also by an American, Joshua Weinstein, whose “Flying on One Engine” tells the story of Doctor Sharadkumar Dicksheet, a crippled New York surgeon considered a “living god” in India for his marathon work on children’s deformities.

“It’s a New York story. It’s an India story,” Weinstein said.

And the East-West connection works both ways.

Amyn Kaderali’s comedy “Kissing Cousins” is set in Los Angeles, but gave New York actor Samrat Chakrabarti the chance to break the typecasting he says he faces in US films.

“Being an Asian in New York I play doctors, medical assistants, terrorists.

The casting director would say: ‘Right, here’s your turban and beard’,” Chakrabarti joked.

“So it’s great to play a human being.”—AFP