Shashwati Talukdar

Selected Screenings:

• Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, New York. Traveled.
• 1st International Festival of Video, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco.
• Albright College Center for the Arts, Freedman Gallery, Reading, Pa.
• Institute of Contemprory Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, “Biographies.” Traveled.
• Diasporiadics, New York.
• MuuMedia Festival, Av-Arkki, Kiasma Museum of Art, Helsinki, Finland.
• Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema.
• Asian American International Film Festival, Asian Cine Vision, New York.
• Chingari Video Festival, Madison, Wisc.
• Documental, Santa Monica, CA.
• Desh-Pardesh, Toronto.
• Association of Asian American Studies, Annual Conference, Philadelphia.
• Whitney Museum of Art Biennial, New York.
• Women’s History Month, Museum of Natural History, New York, NY.
• Frontline Feminisms, UC Riverside, Ca.
• Women in the Director’s Chair, Chicago. Traveled.
• 15th Asian American International Film Festival, Washington, DC.
• 14th San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival.
• Llano Estacado Video Festival, Texas Tech University.
• Women of Color Film and Video Festival, Santa Cruz, Ca.
• Cultural Cartographies Conference, UNC, Raleigh, NC.
• Women in Transition: 25th Anniversary, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia.
• Feminist Film and Video Series, CEC, Philadelphia.

My Life as a Poster

My Life as a Poster is a fake autobiography designed to stimulate debate about cultural representations. It tells a fictional story about the filmmaker and her family; using images of popular Indian film stars and a keen sense of parody, it explores the marginalizing aspects of identity politics, and the “First World’s” expectations from a “Third World” filmmaker. (7:30 min. 1995)

Press:

“My Life as a Poster tackles issues of misrepresentation when filmmakers examine those unlike themselves but are exhorted to tell personal stories in an effort to “give voice” to their culture. Talukdar’s (video) challenges that through its parody of personal documentary. Using film posters, Talukdar comments on the notion of identity and the power of visual icons.”–Erika Mohammad, The Independent.

Distributed by NAATA,San Francisco.

Screenings:

• Mediopolis- Berlin International Film Festival.Traveled.
  
• 1st International Festival of Video, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• Freedman Gallery, Albright College Center for the Arts, Reading, Pa.
• Institute of Contemprory Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, “Biographies.”
• Last Monday, Big House Theater, Philadelphia.
• MuuMedia Festival, Av-Arkki, Kiasma Museum of Art, Helsinki, Finland.
• Museum of American Art, Philadelphia.
• The Painted Bride, Philadelphia.
• Documental, Santa Monica, CA.
• Cultural Cartographies Conference, UNC, Raleigh, NC.
• Feminist Film and Video Series, CEC, Philadelphia.

Broadcast:

• Unquote TV, Philadelphia.
• DUTV-54, Philadelphia.

Any Number You Want

This video is a numerical exploration of “facts.” It inquires into the tendency to impose order on history and the futility of doing so. Mixing live action and graphics, it explores the quantification of chaos.

Inspired by cheaply made late-night sex ads, this video was made on a very old Amiga computer using Toaster software. An homage to technologies considered obsolete. (7:40 min. 1994)

Press:

” …the arbitrary nature of order and chaos….A Sesame Street segment run amok” -Robin Rice, Philadelphia City Paper.

Tahini and Tears Screenings

• Sonoma Valley Film Festival.
• Ms Films Festival, Durham, NC.
• James River Film Festival, VA.
• A Taste of Art Short Film Festival, New York.
• New Filmmakers, Anthology Archives, New York.
• Valentines Show, Denton, TX.

Tahini and Tears Bios

Screenwriter, Olga Humphrey is a playwright and screenwriter. Her plays have been enthusiastically reviewed by such publications as the “New Yorker” and the “Boston Globe,” published, and performed internationally. This past spring, two of her plays received their premieres, in Buffalo and Boston (”I Used to Be Famous Once” and “Veronika Vavoom, Volcanologist”). In 2003, she was awarded a development grant by the LEF Foundation and a fellowship from IFP/New York. As a screenwriter, her work has been optioned and gained the interest of some well-known actors such as Parker Posey, Gretchen Mol, and Jared Harris. Currently, her screenplay “Tea With Pippa” is a finalist in an international screenwriting competition.

Producer,Robin Berla graduated from the prestigious film program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1991. She has produced and directed a number of documentary and reality segments and programs for television, which have aired nationally on various networks, including VH-1, Food Network, and AMC. Recent projects include the Emmy-nominated Keeping Kids Healthy for PBS and Style Court, for style network and E! Entertainment Television. In addition, Robin has done extensive work in New York City’s independent film world as a producer, production manager and line producer. She served as line producer on the theatrical release, Being Claudine and has twice been a participant in RIPFest, in which 100 New York City filmmakers who have never met before are given just 16 days to collaborate on six completely original short films, from start to finish. In 1997 she co-founded Media Grrls, a bicoastal networking group for women working in media-related professions. In 2004 she was elected as Member At Large to the East Coast Chapter Executive Committee for the Producer’s Guild of America, in which she has been an active member since 2001.

For complete credits list and photos go to the downloads page. E-mail me for password.

Tahini and Tears

Tahini and Tears is an “orientalist” fantasy about cruel and charming men and the foolish women who love them. Victor Casablanca, Mina and Jane are at the center of this fantastic drama about objects of desire and pain.

Press:

“Tahini and Tears is weird, fun, funny, and smart. Man, I wish I could be Victor Casablanca.”
Chris Garcia, Film Festivals.com; Fanboyplanet.com

Tahini and Tears was produced as a part of RIPFest #2, an exciting “experiment” where crew-members and cast are brought together to make a completely original film in two weeks. Six teams who had never met before were given a common theme and a few other things to include, and then each separate team was assigned locations. The writers were then given a weekend to write specifically to the theme, locations, and actors assigned. Tahini and Tears sprang from the very imaginative minds of Team #2 (or, as we affectionately dubbed ourselves, “Team Vespa”). Written in one weekend, shot in the next, and fully edited one week later.

Technical Specs
Video exhibition format: 1:1.33. BetaSP NTSC, miniDV. Sound: Mono Ch. 1 and 2.

Snake-Byte Screenings

• Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema
• San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival
• Chicago Asian American Film Festival
• Chicks with Flicks, New York
• Desh Pardesh, Toronto, Canada

Charles Sobhraj

Charles Sobhraj is of Vietnamese and Indian parentage and was born in 1944 in Saigon. Sobhraj gained notoriety in the seventies for committing what got dubbed as the “Bikini murders.” He usually preyed on Westerners traveling in Asia, and is reputed to have committed over 20 murders.

When I was growing up in India, the papers were full of stories about Charles, who was nicknamed “The Serpent.” He had tried to commit a spectacular jewel heist in a hotel, which involved binding and gagging the occupant of the room above the store, and drilling a hole in the floor. Just like in a Jules Dassin film

There were thrilling stories of escapes from jail. Like the time he dug a tunnel in an Afghan prison with a spoon. Another escape story involved setting fire to a prison van in Greece, while he and the other convicts were locked inside it.

Charles was finally captured in India and spent twenty years behind bars. He was released in 1997, and moved to Paris.

The last I heard of Charles was that he was planning to make a film about his life and publish the novels he had written in jail. Those plans must have been stymied by his recent arrest in Kathmandu for a murder he committed almost thirty years ago.

While researching Charles Sobhraj for “Eunuch Alley,” I came across a broadcast news story about him. The transcript from that broadcast became the script for “Snake-Byte.”

If you are interested in finding out more about Charles, there are a couple of books available from Amazon.com:

The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj by Richard Neville, Julie Clarke

Serpentine by Thomas Thompson

Both of these books are quite lurid, but then the man is a sociopath after all. Apparently the authors used interviews and were quite thorough in their research. However, it is difficult to ignore the Orientalist tenor of their narrative, they seem to have taken up from where the old “yellow peril” Fu-Manchu movies left off. So reading these books is quite a rich experience, some of it unintended by their authors I am sure.

I have been keeping up with Sobhraj’s career and you can read about him in the project related news section of my blog.

Snake-Byte

Snakebyte re-enacts an actual, prime-time TV news report on Charles Sobhraj, a famous Vietnamese-Indian criminal. With mordant humour, the video explores the conjunction of racism, tourism and the news. (With Dina Mendros. Video. 9:30 min. 1998)

Press:

“….My favorite of the Fest Indies shorts…Snake-Byte savages the fear-inducing racism of broadcast TV through the story of a killer described as a cross between Belmondo and Krishna…hilariously deadpan.”-Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper.

Suported by:

Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association/Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Rumination and Advice from Dr. Abbey

Rumination and Advice from Dr. Abbey

This video is an interview with the artist’s friend, who is pretending to be an agony aunt, Dr. Abbey. It explores ideas about sexual promiscuity and takes a humorous look at sex. (3:30 min. 1995)

Unable to (Re)member Roop Kanwar Screenings

The Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia.

CEC feminist film series, Philadelphia.

Unable to (Re)member Roop Kanwar

Unable to (Re)member Roop Kanwar examines the realm of middle-class domesticity to look at the practice of Sati. Rather than situating violence against women in so-called traditional culture, it looks at it as a product of modernity. (For a dance performance by Ananya Chatterjea. Video. 16 min. 1997)

Supported by:
-Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia.

RetroAction

RetroAction was the result of a dream. It plays with the interactions of its two protagonists to capture the experience of trying to remember. It uses image-sound relationships in a non-linear time frame to explore the underpinnings of memory. (5:30 min. 1998)

Denotified and Nomadic Tribes of India

The so-called denotified tribes of India are among the lasting victims of British imperialism. Originally “notified” by the government as criminals in 1871, the DNTs should have enjoyed the freedom of independence that came to the rest of India’s people in 1947. Instead, they have languished as the most handicapped community in the nation, with health, literacy, and employment levels far below the average.

The British labeled them criminals because they pursued a nomadic way of life. The nomadic tribes traditionally carried important commodities such as salt and honey between the coasts and the inland forests. The British relied on these networks to establish their own trading relationships and to guide their armies through unknown regions. Indeed, these traders and transporters of goods were crucial informants for the new rulers, who benefited from tribal knowledge of flora and fauna, transportation and communication.

As railways and telegraphs were built in the 1850s such networks became redundant. The colonial authorities grew nervous about people who moved around, carrying intelligence they could not control directly. In the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 these former allies were seen as potential enemies. In 1871, an Act was passed for “the notification of criminal tribes.” Hundreds of tribes that traditionally collected food from the forest became criminals with the stroke of a pen. When they could not be forcibly settled, they were sometimes shot on sight. Those who were settled were subjected to a pass system to control their movements and were rehabilitated through rigorous labor.

These criminal tribes were properly denotified in 1952 after India’s independence. But they were reclassified as habitual offenders in 1959. The stigma of the criminal label still follows them to this day. Many laws and regulations in various states prohibit certain communities of people from traveling; others must still register at police stations in the districts they pass through. This close association with authority makes nomadic tribes especially liable to suspicion when crimes actually occur. The percentage of DNTs in custody and under investigation is greatly disproportionate to their population.

–Henry Schwartz, Director, Program on Justice and Peace, Georgetown University

About Mahasweta Devi’s Life and Work

Mahashweta Devi was born in 1926 in the city of Dhaka in East Bengal (modern day Bangladesh). As an adolescent, she and her family moved to West Bengal in India.

Born into a literary family, Mahasweta Devi was also influenced by her early association with Gananatya, a group who attempted to bring social and political theater to rural villages in Bengal in the 1930’s and 1940’s. After finishing a master’s degree in English literature from Calcutta University, Devi began working as a teacher and journalist. Her first book, Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi), was published in 1956. This work also marked the beginning of a prolific literary career.

In the last forty years, Devi has published twenty collections of short stories and close to a hundred novels, primarily in her native language of Bengali. She has also been a regular contributor to several literary magazines such as Bortika, a journal dedicated to the cause of oppressed communities within India. In 1984, she retired from her job as an English lecturer at a Calcutta university to concentrate on her writing.

In the last decade, Devi has been the recipient of several literary prizes. She was awarded the Jnanpath, India’s highest literary award in 1995. In the following year, she was one of the recipients of the Magsaysay award, considered to be the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize. She lives and works in Calcutta, India.

-Deepika Bahri, Associate Professor, Postcolonial Literature & Culture; Critical Theory, Emory University

Books by Mahasweta Devi

Mahasweta Devi’s body of work is enormous. A collection of her work in Bengali is being published in forty volumes. Some of her books are available from Amazon. My personal favorites are Imaginary Maps, Queen of Jhansi and Breast Stories.

Chotti Munda and His Arrow

Imaginary Maps

Our Non-veg Cow

Bashai Tudu

Titu Mir

Old Women

Dust on the Road

Bitter Soil

Glory of Sri Sri Ganesh

Mother of 1084

Breast Stories

Plays of Mahasweta Devi

Dewana, Khoimala and the Holy Banyan Tree

Body

Queen of Jhansi

• Dallas South Asian Film Festival.
• Michigan State University, Social Justice and South Asian Imagery, Lansing, MI.
• Social Justice in the South Asian Imagination: Tribal Literature and Film, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
• Emerging Forms, University of Washington, Seattle.
• Georgetown University, Washington DC.

To purchase a copy of this film, e-mail me.

Mahasweta Devi: Witness, Advocate, Writer

Language is a weapon, its not for shaving your armpits.

So says eminent writer Mahasweta Devi in this documentary about the her life and work.

At the center of a half-century of tumultuous change, the lifetime of Mahasweta Devi has spanned the British period, Independence, and fifty years of postcolonial turmoil. Her writing has given Indian literature a new life and inspired two generations of writers, journalists and filmmakers. A celebrated writer and tireless activist; for the last two decades, she has led a battled on the behalf of the De-notified tribes of India-indigenous groups who were branded “natural criminals” by the British Colonial State, who face discrimination to this day, despite being “de-notified.”

Informal in style, this video explores how Mahasweta’s daily life and writing is a part of her life as a tireless worker for the rights of the aboriginal peoples of India.

(Sometimes spelt as Mahashweta Devi or Mahasveta Devi . I have used the spelling usually used in her books)

Ravings of a Geometry Lover

What do Pythagoras, love and triangles have in common with beans? (1:32 min. 1996)

This video was made for the “Triangles” show by Termite TV, a media collective that has been producing alternative media since 1992.

Eunuchs

Eunuchs are known as hijras in South Asia, the Urdu word for “impotent ones.” They are neither man nor woman, but form a third sex.

The eunuchs or hijras in Eunuch Alley are based on what I know of encountering hijras in India. They would appear on festive occasions like weddings and births. Where they would dance and give their blessings in return for alms.

There was an element of fearful fascination involved in this exchange. If they did not receive satisfactory alms, they would threaten to expose themselves, and it was this moment of witnessing castration that became the critical point of negotiation between the eunuchs and the host family.

The hijras of Eunuch Alley are quite a glamorous version of Indian hijras- they wear silk saris and are quite genteel. Hijras in India tend to be quite poor and their lives are often difficult both economically and socially. It wasn’t always like this for this community. They seem to have had a real place and privilege in Indian society, and their conditions seem to have deteriorated with the onset of colonialism.

Today there are said to be 1.3 million hijras. Despite the enormous obstacles they face, there is tremendous drive and creativity in this community, and some hijras have successfully run for office, and thrive in other ways.

While I was casting my film, I got many responses from men who wanted to become eunuchs, they wanted their genitals partially or completely removed, but did not necessarily want a sex change operation. So being a hijra is not necessarily specific to South Asia.

Here are a couple of books that I can recommend, these are available from Amazon.com:

Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India by Serena Nanda

A very sympathetic and well researched account of a Hijra community by anthropologist Serena Nanda. This is a very readable book, Serena Nanda can tell a good story, while being respectful to her subject.

The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India by Zia Jaffrey

This book is more like a travelogue. The author, an Indian American, goes in search of her roots and comes away with stories of meeting a family of hijras. Rendered in precisely poetic prose, this book gives the reader a great sense of the rhythm and nuances of life lived by a particular community.

Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations by Serena Nanda

I haven’t read this book, but having liked her other book very much, I would imagine that this book is very good too.

I have been keeping up with information and news about Hijras and you can read about them on the project related news section of my blog.

Charles Sobhraj

Charles Sobhraj is of Vietnamese and Indian parentage and was born in 1944 in Saigon. Sobhraj gained notoriety in the seventies for committing what got dubbed as the “Bikini murders.” He usually preyed on Westerners traveling in Asia, and is reputed to have committed over 20 murders.

When I was growing up in India, the papers were full of stories about Charles, who was nicknamed “The Serpent.” He had tried to commit a spectacular jewel heist in a hotel, which involved binding and gagging the occupant of the room above the store, and drilling a hole in the floor. Just like in a Jules Dassin film

There were thrilling stories of escapes from jail. Like the time he dug a tunnel in an Afghan prison with a spoon. Another escape story involved setting fire to a prison van in Greece, while he and the other convicts were locked inside it.

Charles was finally captured in India and spent twenty years behind bars. He was released in 1997, and moved to Paris.

The last I heard of Charles was that he was planning to make a film about his life and publish the novels he had written in jail. Those plans must have been stymied by his recent arrest in Kathmandu for a murder he committed almost thirty years ago.

While researching Charles Sobhraj for “Eunuch Alley,” I came across a broadcast news story about him. The transcript from that broadcast became the script for “Snake-Byte.”

If you are interested in finding out more about Charles, there are a couple of books available from Amazon.com:

The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj by Richard Neville, Julie Clarke

Serpentine by Thomas Thompson

Both of these books are quite lurid, but then the man is a sociopath after all. Apparently the authors used interviews and were quite thorough in their research. However, it is difficult to ignore the Orientalist tenor of their narrative, they seem to have taken up from where the old “yellow peril” Fu-Manchu movies left off. So reading these books is quite a rich experience, some of it unintended by their authors I am sure.

I have been keeping up with Sobhraj’s career and you can read about him in the project related news section of my blog.

Eunuch Alley Bios

Actor Sudipto Chatterjee has a Ph.D. from New York University in Asian and Asian-American performance, film, post-colonial performance, modern and contemporary performance theory. His dissertation on nineteenth-century Bengali Theatre won the Michael Kirby Memorial Prize in 1998. He is the author of fourteen plays and translations in Bengali and English. In 1999, he was awarded the New York Drama Circle Award of Distinction for translation and direction of Nuraldeen’s Lifetime (by Bangladeshi playwright, Syed Shamsul Haq), a bilingual production in Bengali and English. He directed Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana and The Playboy of the Western World at Tufts University, as well as Badal Sircar’s Bhoma at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002, he directed Birpurus, his own Bengali adaptation of The Playboy of the Western World, in Kolkata, India. For ten years, he was the Artistic Director of Epic Actors’ Workshop & Choir in New York. Currently Sudipto is an Assistant Professor (Asian Performance) at UC Berkeley.

Actor Pearce Bunting is a graduate of the Yale school of Drama. In 1999, Pearce was awarded the Judges prize for best performer at the International Theatre Festival at San Antonio and won the Philadelphia Critics Award for best actor. He was won the Barrymore award in 1995. Other than appearing on the Philadelphia stage he has been seen in the International Theatre Festival in the Czech Republic, in Vienna’s English Theatre and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Television credits include Homicide (NBC), As the World Turns (CBS) and the host of Travelers (Discovery Channel, 1996-1998). Currently, Pearce is traveling with the Broadway hit musical, Mamma Mia.

Actor Samuel F. Reynolds has acted, directed, or written for numerous theatres and film productions in the Philadelphia and New York City areas. In 2000, his first full-length play, Dog Fight, was selected for InterAct Theatre’s annual “Showcase of New Plays,” as part of the New Play National Network and chosen as a finalist in the National Arts Club’s Playwrights First contest. In 2000 he was awarded a Theatre Fellowship by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is a published poet and essayist, with some of his work appearing in two critically acclaimed anthologies: Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of American Poetry (Syracuse University Press: 1996) and Testimony: Young African-Americans on Self-Discovery and Black Identity (Beacon Press: 1994). He is a cum laude graduate of Syracuse University and received a master’s degree in African American Studies at Temple University. Currently, Samuel lives in Brooklyn, New York and maintains a growing astrology practice

Producer George McCartin, better known as Veck in the Philadelphia entertainment and arts communities, is a Film Crewman, Photographer and Sound engineer who also works full time at The University of the Arts. McCartin has produced 4 short films and was line producer on 2 feature-length productions in the last 3 years. He recently released 2 twenty-five year anthologies of music and is in production for locals The Banfords. This past year, after the release of the 225 minute Kwederology 3 cd compilation, Veck did a 3-month promotional run of the roving video projection installation Videographitti in and around the Delaware Valley. Sometime in 2005, Veck will undertake… a nap.

For complete credits and photos go to the downloads page. For password e-mail me.

Eunuch Alley

Eunuch Alley is a Bollywood-Noir about gangsters, journalists, eunichs, mothers, and castration. It follows the adventures of a journalist, Salil, as he encounters eunuchs, his mother, and famous criminal Charles Sobhraj. This surreal film is set in India but was shot in Philadelphia, using a multiracial cast. Using elements from Bombay film and from Noir Eunuch Alley rollicks its way from chases to musical numbers to lush flashbacks.

“A combination of David Lynch and Monty Python….disturbingly entertaining!”
Kurt Engfehr, academy award winner, Bowling for Columbine
“Filmmaker Shashwati Talukdar has her glamorous eunuchs dance, sing and lift their skirts to help expose the fears and frailties of men, the confines of gender and the dilemmas of art.”
Veronica Vera, founder and author, Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls

Note: Eunuch Alley does not present a sociologically realistic portrayal of either Eunuchs or Charles Sobhraj.

Supported by:

New York State Council on the Arts

The Jerome Foundation

Taraknath Das Foundation

Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

The Wexner Center for the Arts

WYBE-TV35 Philadelphia

Film exhibition format: 35 mm, 1:1.85. Sound: Optical, stereo, SR (no dolby)
Video exhibition format: BetaSP NTSC. Sound: Stereo.

Bollywood Terror

The US leadership has been watching Bollywood films from the sixties. How else would they know what to say about Terrorism? (2:30 min, 2004)

Created for the Termite TV show on “Terror.”

Watch this video. This is not an internet stream and might take a moment to download:

Broadband (7.2mb)

Dial Up (4.5mb)

Bio

Shashwati Talukdar has made several films and videos which have been screened at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Mediopolis–Berlin, the Whitney Biennial, Kiasma Museum of Art in Helsinki and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She has been supported by entities including the Jerome Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, New York State Foundation of the Arts. She was awarded the James T. Yee Mentorship Award from NAATA (2002) and the Project Involve Fellowship (2003) from IFP/New York. Shashwati was born in Dehra Dun, India and has an MFA from Temple University, Philadelphia. Currently, she resides in New York.

With a trusty Bolex in Iceland

Hooch and Hamlet in Chharanagar

A documentary in progress about a group of young people from a marginalized community, who use theater as tool to fight oppression. For more information go here.

Projects

For information about my projects click on the images or in the menu on the right.