Starting today, the South Asian International Film Festival will be in full swing in New York city.

Friend and film maker Anoli Patel wrote in to surprise me with some great news. The Hangman, a feature-length movie she and her production company Akshar Media have been laboring over was accepted into the festival and will have its US premiere on December 10, at 2 p.m. General admission is $13.

I urge you all to support independent film makers and producers. If you are in NYC this Saturday let's try and meet up to check this film out.

Via Sree Sreenivasan

The celebrated film maker Ismail Merchant has died in London. He had been unwell and admitted to a hospital for stomach ulcers.

Merchant and his partner James Ivory were known for such movies “Remains Of The Day,” “Room With A View,” and “Howard's End.”

Anyone read Merchant's auto-biography “My Passage From India”?

Sakhi, Breakthrough & The New School present a screening of the film MAYA on March 18, 2005, 6:00-9:30 p.m.

“Maya is a powerful film by filmmaker Digvijay Singh that depicts community silence around violence against young girls – and the power of a young boy’s questioning. We look forward to your participation in a stimulating discussion on the involvement of men in the movement to end violence against women.”

The movie will be shown at 66 West 12th St (between 5th and 6th Avenues) Room 407. This is a FREE! event, though seating will be on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Men in the Movement to end Violence Against Women, a discussion moderated by Sunita Mehta, Founder of Women for Afghan Women will include the following speakers: Jon Gilgoff, Educational Alliance and Joe Samalin, Break the Cycle

This event is co-sponsored by Sakhi for South Asian Women, The New School, Lifetime TV’s “Stop Violence Against Women Week”, and Asia Society.

Via Shruthi Reddy

“Bhavum” is “A Streetcar Named Desire” meets “Crime & Punishment” in post-globalization urban India.

“Bhavum: Emotions of Being” will be screened at SALTAF on Sunday, November 21, 2004 at 1:30 pm. The venue: Baird Auditorium (Smithsonian). A Q&A with Satish Menon, the filmmaker, will follow the screening. The film is in Malayalam, with English subtitles and runs 111 minutes.

For more information, please E-mail SALTAF.

“A complex adult novel has been used as the pretext for a low-octane and glassy-eyed Bollywood romp, at a shorter length than usual and without balancing the romcom jollity with any of the genre's usual heartfelt and ingenuous moments of seriousness.”

And so says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian in his scathing review of Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice.