Movies you've seen recently (Part 2)

[Maserschmidt]

@commasense

If you would like to watch a very creative, amusing, unconventional, and amusing view of the Ramayana from the woman’s POV, I highly recommend Sita Sings the Blues (2008) by Nina Paley. If you don’t belive me, here’s what Roger Ebert (the real guy, when he was alive) said about it:

I was enchanted. I was swept away. I was smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord.

Paley became an anti-copyright activist in the course of making the film, because she wanted to use songs from the 1920s by Annette Hanshaw, and was shocked to find that they were still under copyright and that she would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the right to include them in the film. You can read all about that battle here.

As a result, Sita is now CC0, copyright-free, so you can watch it for free and do whatever you want with it.

Enjoy.

I watched this on YouTube and thought the animation was fantastic; also, since it plays to my biases around the treatment of Sita in the Ramayana, it had that appeal. I also liked the overall conceit, which is that she drew together three people who learned different versions of the Ramayana growing up, and they attempt to ‘narrate’ it. Clever stuff.

One thing I went back and forth on, whether to comment on it, but here we are: I went to Nina Paley’s website to buy some merchandise and discovered that some of it was in support of her self-avowed/proud TERFdom (the belief that gender is solely determined by birth biology), which put me off quite a bit. So, no merch acquired.