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Moma EXHIBITION AUTOMATIC UPDATE EXPLORES THE

Moma EXHIBITION AUTOMATIC UPDATE EXPLORES THE

THE NEW AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART CELEBRATES CONTEMPORARY INDIAN CINEMA

Special Appearances Include Human Rights Advocate Kiran Bedi, Academy Award- Winning Documentarian Megan Mylan, and Legendary Actor

The New India June 5 – 18, 2009 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters

NEW YORK, May 7, 2009—The richness and diversity of contemporary Indian cinema is explored in The New India, a two-week, 16- exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, from June 5 through 18, 2009. The exhibition presents feature and short , including eight New York premieres, that capture the range of fiction and documentary genres and styles in Indian cinema today. Among the celebrated guests who will present their films in person at MoMA are actors Naseeruddin Shah and , actor-director , and the Academy Award-winning documentarian Megan Mylan. The exhibition is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Uma da Cunha, guest curator. The New India opens on June 5 with the New York premiere of Megan Doneman’s Yes Madam, Sir (2008), a riveting portrait, narrated by Mirren, of one of India’s most inspiring and controversial public figures, Kiran Bedi. Both Doneman and Bedi will introduce the opening- night screening. As India’s first elite policewoman and revolutionary reformer of one of India’s most notorious prisons, Bedi received the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award (Asia’s Nobel Prize equivalent) for her three-decade fight against corruption, bureaucracy, and human rights violations. India is one of the world's fastest growing nations, with a film industry to match. Over 1,000 features are produced each year, from blockbusters to intimate , Bengali, and Tamil "art films." A country whose population now numbers more than a billion— with 23 official languages (including , , and English), hundreds of regional dialects, dozens of political parties, and myriad religions—is united by a passion for cinema. Following the success of MoMA's India Now exhibition in 2007, The New India features three recent commercially and critically successful Bollywood hits. ’s Jodhaa (2007), the latest blockbuster by the director of Langaan, is a sixteenth-century historical romance of Cecil B. DeMille proportions, featuring a cast of a thousand elephants. ’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008) is a sharp satire of New culture, which will be introduced by its star, Abhay Deol, on June 8. And ’s (2009) is both a dazzling homage to 1940s and 1950s backstage melodramas and a witty send-up of the Bollywood dream factory, featuring cameos by some of India’s most beloved movie stars. Exemplifying the so-called unconventional, or “parallel,” cinema is ’s sleeper hit A Wednesday, a disturbing cat-and-mouse thriller introduced by its legendary star, Naseeruddin Shah, on June 10. Further celebrating genre moviemaking with their New York premieres are Faiza Ahmad ’s infectiously charming documentary Supermen of Malegaon (2008), about the filming of a no-budget, Bollywood-inspired superhero movie in a textile village near ; and Shashank Ghosh’s Quick Gun Murugan (2008), a zany, outrageous “curry Western” by a promising new talent from the wildly popular of southern India. Bengali cinema is represented by one of its most internationally respected filmmakers, , whose recent film The Voyeurs (2008) is a slyly ironic and poignant study of urban anxiety, repressed desire, and voyeurism in the teeming city of (formerly Calcutta). The New India also explores some of the devastating problems afflicting India today, from child exploitation and AIDS to sectarian riots and tribal uprooting. Politically charged fiction films include Chapour Haghighat’s The Firm Land (2008), about a village on the Indian Ocean that is threatened with a deadly disease (Haghighat will introduce the New York premiere on June 6); Nandita Das’s (2008), an intense drama about the tragic aftermath of the 2002 sectarian riots in (introduced on June 6 by director Das, who is also a celebrated actor and activist); and Father Joseph Pulinthanath’s Roots (2008), about the brutal upheaval of tribal peoples in northeast India, a landscape and culture virtually unknown even in India. The exhibition features a notably strong selection of recent nonfiction films, many of them centering on stories of children that are by turns inspiring and disturbing. Megan Mylan’s Academy Award-winning short subject Smile Pinki (introduced by the director on June 7) is the poignant story of a village girl who is cured of her cleft lip. Rajesh S. Jala’s Children of the Pyre (2008), winner of top prizes at the Montreal and São Paulo Film Festivals, is the harrowing portrait of seven “untouchable” boys who tend the largest open-air crematorium in Varanasi. And Sourav Sarangi’s Bilal (2008) follows an eight-year-old boy as he helps his blind parents navigate, and even survive, the slums of Mumbai. The exhibition The New India is made possible by Marguerite and Kent Charugundla, Tamarind Art Council.

Press Contact: Meg Blackburn, (212) 708-9757, [email protected]

For downloadable images, please visit www.moma.org/press.

No. 43

Public Information: The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019

Hours: Films are screened Wednesday-Monday. For screening schedules, please visit www.moma.org. Film Admission: $10 adults; $8 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D. $6 full-time students with current I.D. (For admittance to film programs only.) The price of a film ticket may be applied toward the price of a Museum admission ticket when a film ticket stub is

2 presented at the Lobby Information Desk within 30 days of the date on the stub (does not apply during Target Free Friday Nights, 4:00-8:00 p.m.). Admission is free for Museum members and for Museum ticketholders. The public may call (212) 708-9400 for detailed Museum information. Visit us at www.moma.org

Screening Schedule

The New India

Friday, June 5

8:00 Yes Madam, Sir. 2008. India/. Directed by Megan Doneman. Kiran Bedi is one of the most inspiring and controversial public figures in India today. In 1972, despite fierce opposition, she became India’s first elite policewoman, and stunned the nation by facing down three thousand sword- wielding Punjabi rioters armed only with a wooden baton. Later, she became the governor of one of Asia’s most notorious jails, Tihar, and transformed it into a model for prison reform worldwide. Her three-decade battle against seemingly indomitable forces of corruption, bureaucracy, sexism, and prejudice, and her work on behalf of women, prisoners, and community charities, has been nothing less than visionary, earning her the Ramon Magsaysay Award (Asia’s equivalent to a Nobel Peace Prize) and a key position at the United Nations. In this fascinating documentary portrait, narrated by Helen Mirren, Doneman offers an honest, intimate look at Bedi’s astonishing life and career, while also examining the considerable personal costs of public duty and media celebrity. In Hindi; English subtitles. 95 min. New York premiere. Introduced by Kiran Bedi and Megan Doneman

Saturday, June 6

2:00 Yes Madam, Sir. Introduced by Kiran Bedi and Megan Doneman. (See Friday, June 5, 8:00.)

5:00 The Firm Land. 2008. India/France. Written and directed by Chapour Haghighat. With Mansoor Seth, Ava Mukherjee, Honey Chaya. When a deadly disease (AIDS, though not named as such) threatens to wipe out an entire village on the Indian Ocean, six emissaries are sent to the big city to find “learned” men who can help bring immediate medical care. The villagers are quickly rebuffed by the corruption and indifference of government bureaucrats, but find comfort, and a means to resistance, in the companionship of other marginalized figures: a group of street kids, a disillusioned retired professor, and a formerly aristocratic old woman who hosts a grand and joyous feast for them. With a quiet moral outrage and a compassionate understanding of human cruelty and folly—reminiscent of the films of Abderrahamane Sissako—the Iranian-born filmmaker and playwright Haghighat gives his film what he calls “both a realistic and mythical approach, using a mixture of dream and reality.” 95 min. New York premiere. Introduced by Chapour Haghighat

8:00 Firaaq. 2008. India. Directed by Nandita Das. Screenplay by Das, Shuchi Kothari. With Naseeruddin Shah, , . Making her deeply affecting, remarkably self-assured debut as a feature film director, the celebrated actress and activist Nandita Das (star of ’s Earth and Fire) puts a human face on the sectarian riots that caused thousands of deaths, most of them Muslim, in Gujurat in 2002. With a veteran ensemble cast led by Shah, Rawal, and Naval, she intricately weaves together the very different stories of ordinary people—Hindus and Muslims alike—who nonetheless share a

3 shattering sense of loss and terror in the immediate aftermath of the carnage. Firaaq, whose title comes from an Urdu word meaning separation or quest, is a powerful cry against violence, intolerance, and injustice by a filmmaker more interested in provoking questions than reinforcing stereotypes. A highlight of the 2008 Telluride Film Festival (where it was presented by ) and the Toronto Film Festival. In Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati; English subtitles. 101 min. Wagah. 2009. India/Germany/. Directed by Supriyo Sen. Winner of a top prize at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival and made in commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this short documentary depicts an astonishing ritual that takes place nightly at the frontier outpost of Wagah—the only road link along the 2,500-kilometer border between India and Pakistan. Thousands of citizens, young and old, gather at sundown for the ceremonial lowering of the Indian and Pakistani flags, each side trading taunts of Pakistan Zindabad (Long live Pakistan!) and Jai Hind (Long live India!) with all the fervency of bitter soccer rivals. Wim Wenders, who headed the Berlin jury, celebrated Wagah as “a convincing manifesto against any wall that divides people.” In Farsi, Hindi, Urdu; English subtitles. 9 min. New York premiere. Introduced by Nandita Das

Sunday, June 7

2:30 Smile Pinki. 2008. India/USA. Directed by Megan Mylan. Winner of the 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject, Smile Pinki is the inspiring story of Pinki Kumari, a radiantly charming six-year-old girl who was born with a cleft lip and made an outcast in her village. (In rural India, a cleft lip or palate is often believed to be a bad omen caused when a pregnant mother uses a knife or scissors during an eclipse.) One fateful day, Pinki is led to a hospital run by the Smile Train, a global charity, where she and thousands of other poverty-stricken children are cured of their debilitating birth defect. Director Mylan introduces the June 7 screening. 39 min. Bilal. 2008. India. Directed by Sourav Sarangi. Worlds away from Slumdog Millionaire, Sarangi’s profoundly moving documentary follows a clever, mischievous three-year-old boy who must grow up fast in order to help his blind parents navigate, and even survive, the slums of Kolkata. Filmmaker Sarangi spent a year living with the family in their home—a cramped and dimly lit room that, while a treacherous obstacle course for Bilal’s blind parents and aging grandmother, is also a place of comfort, and even joy. In Bengali, Hindi; English subtitles. 52 min. New York premiere. Introduced by Megan Mylan

5:30 Luck by Chance. 2009. India. Directed by Zoya Akhtar. Screenplay by Akhtar, Javed Aktar. In her dazzling directorial debut, Akhtar pays loving homage to the backstage melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s while also creating a biting satire of the Bollywood dream factory. An aspiring actor (, Zoya’s brother) and a rising starlet (Kokona Sen Sharma) romance and scheme their way to movie stardom. Zoya Akhtar deftly captures the craft of moviemaking in all its (seamy) glory, and screen icons like , , , Shahrukh Khan, and make playfully self-deprecating cameos. Delightful, too, are an over-the-top, circus-themed musical number and end credits that feature the cheerily hopeful faces of the film’s real-life crew: spot boys and dancers, chai-wallahs and makeup artists. In Hindi; English subtitles. 156 min.

Monday, June 8

4:30 Firaaq/Wagah. Introduced by Nandita Das. (See Saturday, June 6, 8:00.)

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8:00 Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! 2008. India. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee. With Abhay Deol, Neetu Chandra, Paresh Rawal. Rising star Abhay Deol—who introduces the MoMA screening on June 8—has charm in spades in this upbeat caper about a loveable grifter, the real-life Lucky Singh, who cons his way into the homes of Delhi’s high society and proceeds to rob them blind. As with his comedy hit about real estate sharks, Khosla Ka Ghosla (presented at MoMA in 2007), director Banerjee proves himself to be a sharp and acerbic chronicler of the New India, creating a sprawling panorama of familiar types: the nouveau riche, with their restless hunger for social status and bling, the sensationalist media, the various hustlers and hucksters and hangers-on, and the Everymen who struggle daily to find a foothold on the ladder to success. In Hindi; English subtitles. 121 min. Introduced by Abhay Deol

Wednesday, June 10

4:00 The Firm Land. (See Saturday, June 6, 5:00.)

8:00 A Wednesday. 2008. India. Written and directed by Neeraj Pandey. With Naseeruddin Shah, Anupam Kehr, Jimi Shergill. In this cat-and-mouse thriller, a sleeper hit in India, a terrorist threatens to detonate bombs all over Mumbai, and police and counterintelligence forces have four hours to find him. With a commanding performance by one of India’s great actors, Naseeruddin Shah—who introduces the June 10 screening—A Wednesday has polarized audiences with its controversial message and, in the wake of several shocking terrorist incidents (the recent Mumbai attacks only being the most international in scope), has provoked agonized debates about police corruption, national security, and vigilante justice. A Wednesday signals a trend, undoubtedly disturbing, in contemporary Indian cinema. In Hindi; English subtitles. 102 min. New York premiere. Introduced by Naseeruddin Shah

Thursday, June 11

4:00 A Wednesday. (See Wednesday, June 10, 8:00.)

7:00 Smile Pinki/Bilal. (See Sunday, June 7, 2:30.)

Friday, June 12

4:30 Yarwng (Roots). 2008. India. Written and directed by Father Joseph Pulinthanath. The brutal and bitter upheaval of tribal peoples in northeast India, their fertile riverside villages submerged by the construction of a hydroelectric dam in the 1970s, forms the backdrop to this unresolved love story between a young man and woman who are driven apart on the day they are meant to be married. Using nonprofessional actors (who relive their own traumatic experiences on screen) and depicting the landscape of Tripura, the tribal language of Kokborok, and a fascinating culture rarely captured on film and almost completely unknown even within India, Pulinthanath, a Catholic priest and a native of Kerala, creates an almost timeless fable about the clash of civilizations, and the forces of modernity that threaten to obliterate tribal life. In Kokborok; English subtitles. 90 min. North American premiere.

8:00 Luck by Chance. (See Sunday, June 7, 5:30.)

5 Saturday, June 13

1:30 The Voyeurs (Ami, Yasin Ar Amar Madhubala). 2008. India. Written and directed by Buddhadeb Dasgupta. With Prosenjit Chatterjee, Sameera Reddy, Amitav Bhattacharya. Internationally acclaimed Bengali filmmaker Dasgupta, whose Memories of the Mist was a highlight of the MoMA exhibition India Now in 2007, returns with a slyly ironical and poignant study of urban anxiety, repressed desire, and voyeurism. In this masterfully told drama, filled with elements of magic realism, a naïve young man relocates from his small village to the teeming, cosmopolitan city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), where he moves in with the only person he knows, a similarly innocent young man who installs surveillance cameras for a living. When they begin spying on a beautiful young dancer who moves in next door (played by popular Bollywood actress Sameera Reddy), their lives change in unsettling ways. In Bengali; English subtitles.107 min.

4:00 Children of the Pyre. 2008. India. Directed by Rajesh S. Jala. A harrowing, graphic, and truly unforgettable portrait of seven “untouchable” boys who work in near-slavery conditions at the largest open-air crematorium in Varanasi, the ancient and sacred northeast Indian city on the banks of the mighty Ganges. The boys stoke the fires that keep the funeral pyres eternally burning, and retrieve the limbs that have gone astray. They are often beaten as they try to scrounge for brightly colored burial shrouds to resell. Their lives are made bearable by marijuana and gallows humor. Nearly two years in the making, this verité-style documentary has won top prizes at the Sao Paolo and Montreal film festivals; director Jala has dedicated it to the “millions of ill-fated children who never get an opportunity to have a normal childhood.” In Hindi; English subtitles. 74 min. New York premiere. A Mango Tree in the Front Yard. 2009. France/India. Written and directed by Pradeepan . Set in war-ravaged Sri Lanka and filmed in southeast India, Raveendran’s spare and haunting fiction short centers on a group of Tamil schoolchildren for whom violence is an everyday reality. Presented at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. In Tamil; English subtitles. 11 min. New York premiere.

8:00 Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (See Monday, June 8, 8:00.)

Sunday, June 14

2:30 Roots (Yarwng). (See Friday, June 12, 4:30.)

5:30 Supermen of Malegaon. 2008. India/Japan/South Korea/. Directed by Faiza Ahmad Khan. Khan’s irrepressibly charming documentary gives new meaning to “indie” filmmaking. In a largely Muslim textile community not far from the Bollywood capital of Mumbai, part-time wedding videographer Shaikh Nasir enlists friends and neighbors to make an action-packed movie of his own. Despite the often hilarious mishaps and conceits—the pencil-thin actor playing Superman is nearly snapped in two during one of the fight sequences—their passion and ingenuity become a testament to the magic of cinema. As Khan observes, "Working at a loom is an underpaying job involving serious health risks...They work six days a week for about ten hours a day and they're on their feet the whole while. So on a Friday, which is a holiday, they go to a movie to forget the drudgery of their lives. For those three hours, they are Shahrukh Khan running through mustard fields or Abhishek Bachchan chasing a beautiful woman around trees." In Urdu, Hindi; English subtitles. 52 min. New York premiere.

6 Monday, June 15

4:30 The Voyeurs. (See Saturday, June 13, 1:30.)

8:00 Quick Gun Murugan. 2008. India. Directed by Shashank Ghosh. Screenplay by Rajesh Devraj. With Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Rambha, Nasseer. Ghosh’s outrageously clever, genre-bending spoof—a “curry Western” filled with cartoonish violence, gaudy spectacle, and anti-corporate zeal— is one of the zaniest movies to come out of India in ages, and quickly establishes Ghosh as one of the most promising new talents to come out of the wildly popular Tamil cinema of southern India. Based on his cult television character Quick Gun Murugan, Ghosh’s Western parody opens in rural South India, where a town of peaceful vegetarians has been overrun by the infamous Rice-Plate Reddy and his gang of meat-eating bandits. The gunslinging vegetarian Murugan, a sworn protector of cows, comes to the rescue but meets a dastardly fate, only to be reincarnated in present-day Mumbai to foil Reddy’s plans for world domination through the carnivore-loving McDosa restaurant chain. In Tamil, English; English subtitles. 97 min. New York premiere.

Wednesday, June 17

4:00 Children of the Pyre/A Mango Tree in the Front Yard. (See Saturday, June 13, 4:00.)

6:30 . 2007. India. Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker. Screenplay by Gowariker, Haidar Ali. With Hrithik , . Narrated by . From the writer-director of the crossover hit Langaan comes this epic of Cecil B. DeMille proportions, one of the most expensive and lavish Bollywood blockbusters ever made. In scenes that alternate between bloodshed, courtly intrigue, bodice heaving, and song and dance, Gowariker’s sixteenth-century historical romance traces the courtship between a reformist-minded Muslim emperor and a feisty princess. No less exceptional are the cast of a thousand elephants, the exotic landscapes of Rajasthan and northern India, Neeta Lulla’s sumptuous costuming, a rousing score by Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire), and the stentorian voice of legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan. Jodhaa Akbar truly must be seen to be believed. 213 min.

Thursday, June 18

4:00 Supermen of Malegaon. (See Sunday, June 14, 5:30.)

7:00 Quick Gun Murugan. (See Monday, June 15, 8:00.)

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