The Enzian Theater's South Asian Film Festival, co-presented by the Asian Cultural Association, is celebrating 30 years of proving that Indian subcontinent cinema is more than just Bollywood musicals.
This year's fest, set for Oct. 5-7, will screen four features and four shorts either from South Asia or focused on its culture and people. The diverse genres include supernatural road trip, nature documentary, coming-of-age, comedy and social docudrama.
After three decades, Orlando takes the festival for granted, but it had an unlikely beginning as a collaboration between Enzian and Jasbir Mehta, founder and program director of the Asian Cultural Association.
"My whole motivation in the arts is to ... bring people together, so that we come face to face and eliminate our fears and find common ground," Mehta says. "So I've always used, in my life, arts as a way to bring people together.
"Thirty years ago, there was no forum in the state for Indian film [or] independent filmmakers to showcase their work, so ... we wanted to give them a platform," Mehta continues. "So I went to Enzian and ... put together a program."
Three decades on, Mehta is still creating that program, along with Enzian programming director Matthew Curtis and programming coordinator Tim Anderson, plus input from the ACA. They watch 40 to 50 films to form the fest, choosing from movies submitted to them and ones they seek themselves.
"To our knowledge, this festival is the longest continually running South Asian film festival in the United States," Curtis says, "so reaching our 30th anniversary is certainly a source of pride for both Enzian and the Asian Cultural Association."
At least one thing is different today: Mehta is no longer preparing the food herself. ("I remember making 60-100 samosas and bringing them to the festival," she recalls.) That's now handled by Enzian chefs. This year's menu includes samosas with tamarind sauce, mint chutney sandwiches, chicken curry with rice and vegetables, Mumbai margaritas, Kingfisher beer, mango lassi and pistachio ice cream, plus the theater's regular fare.
Both the food and the films offer those who have never visited the Indian subcontinent an education, but the event holds value for Indian expats too.
"When immigrants come here, you know, the country freezes at the time that you come," Mehta says. "I've been in this country now more than 40 years, so it's only through the movies that we keep current."
The 2024 event is bookended by its best offerings, The Red Suitcase and Girls Will Be Girls. The former (11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 5), a haunting directorial debut from Fidel Devkota, is receiving its Southeast premiere. This Nepali-language mystery-drama involves a truck driver on a two-day trip from Katmandu, Nepal, to deliver a box and a red suitcase to a remote village. But mirroring his journey is a solitary figure with a seemingly identical suitcase. Rod Serling would be proud.
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Girls Will Be Girls (6:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 7), directed by Shuchi Talati, is a multinational production, filmed mostly in English but set in India, also getting its Southeast debut. At a Himalayan boarding school, Mira is the star pupil but is having difficulty balancing her books with a budding romance and her meddlesome mother. But Talati's study in adolescence is anything but adolescent. Assured, tender, well-acted, naturalistic and surprisingly complicated, the coming-of-age film has a lot to say about girls, and women.
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The other two features are documentaries, balancing the festival perfectly between fiction and non-fiction. Nocturnes (11 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 6), directed by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinvasan, is a serene, occasionally mesmerizing look at researchers studying moths in the eastern Himalayas. Co-presented by Enzian's Science on Screen program, the minimalist, mostly Hindi-language doc, at just 83 minutes, might have been better as a short. But nature-lovers and those seeking a break from our crazy urban world will be drawn to it like a moth to, well, you know.
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The other documentary is Call Me Dancer (1:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 5), helmed by Pip Gilmour and Leslie Shampaine. Filmed in English and Hindi over several years, it follows an aspiring dancer as he struggles to find prestige and pay. Accompanying him on his unlikely journey from Mumbai to international fame is an aging Israeli ballet master with his own unusual story. The unique Dancer has a lot to say but doesn't always have the right moves, resulting in a film that rarely feels consequential or compelling.
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Chhota Cinema: New Indian Shorts (2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6) offers four fiction films. ("Chhota" means "short" in Hindi.) Two are captivating: Places I've Called My Own, an emotionally resonant look at a young, gay woman's alienation upon returning to India for her father's funeral; and Men in Blue, a gritty glimpse into the exploitation of Indian workers in Texas, based on real events.
The other shorts are vastly different from one another. Dosh, an intimate but vague glimpse into a family's mental-health struggles, flirts with profundity but bites off a bit more than it can chew for a 16-minute film. Lastly, Barely Breathing is the fest's only full-on comedy, and a broad one too, complete with autoerotic asphyxia. Both it and Dosh are odd choices considering they are set in the United States, filmed in English and offer little Asian cultural insight.
If you're looking for commonality among the films, you might find serenity, minimalism and especially calmness, especially in The Red Suitcase, Nocturnes and even Girls Will Be Girls.
"That calmness comes from that region," Mehta says, referencing Nepal, the setting of The Red Suitcase. "There is a sense of being. There is a sense of something internal about it, which we ... have lost with the commercialization of everything that's going on in this world, the fast pace of life, everything. You know, calmness we tend to lose."
If you wish to regain calmness, it'll cost you $60 for a festival pass, which guarantees priority seating, or $13 for a single ticket. (There's that dreaded commercialism again.) To purchase tickets, visit the Enzian website.
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