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Singing the Film Festival Blues
By all rights, filmmaker Nina Paley should be jumping for joy over the success of her animated feature. Instead, she’s looking for a place to live.
Sunday, July 20, 2008 at 5:45 PM
By FilmStew Staff
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NinaPaley.com
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On top of it all, the bedbugs have bitten...
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For quite some time now, the 82-minute animated feature Sita Sings the Blues has been making the film festival rounds, amassing prizes in Berlin, Annecy and Avignon, France. But for Nina Paley, the New York graphic artist responsible for the film, it has been – and remains – a very bittersweet experience.
“It is bizarre to have the film seemingly doing so well at festivals, while my life feels like it is collapsing around me,” Paley writes on her blog today. “I am broke and homeless. Time I should be spending working on promoting my film - my only asset, my life’s work - has instead been consumed salvaging what I can from my apartment…”
“ I remind myself I’m only losing stuff - my furniture, my books, my posters, my DVDs - and money is just an illusion,” she adds at another point. “It’s just the material world, and I am not a material girl. I am happy Sita is winning awards and going to festivals. I just didn’t imagine a life in which this occurred to look like this.”
Among the many costs incurred by Paley are $6,000’s worth of film festival entry fees. There is also the matter of properly licensing the background music featured in Sita by 1920’s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw. “Yeah, yeah, I knew this going in, but I expected a distributor to pay for some of it,” bemoans Paley. “These costs are a pittance by studio standards, nothing at all really, but I’m still an “indie,” and no matter how many awards Sita wins, no distributor is going to spend real money on her.”
Sita tells the story of a titular Hindu goddess who, after being kidnapped by King Rama, is put through a series of tests to prove her faithfulness to fellow deity Ram. Paley was inspired to make the movie after her own husband dumped her via e-mail while traveling far from New York, in India. Sita screens next at South Africa’s Durban International Film Festival (July 23rd – August 3rd ).
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