A Celebration of Mira Nair

"I would have to admit that I have always been drawn to stories of people who live on the margins of society - on the edge, or outside, learning the language of being in-between, always dealing with the question 'what, and where, is home?" Mira Nair

This year's featured artist, Mira Nair, is a keen observer of contemporary Indian life and through her deeply textured, intimate films has given voice to under-represented communities and ideas, and challenged notions of patriarchy in Indian society. Born in 1957 in Bhubaneshwar, 300 miles south of Calcutta, Nair studied sociology at Delhi University where she was involved with political theater. At 19 Nair attended Harvard University and studied with founders of the American cinema verité movement Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker.

Though widely known for her feature films including Mississippi Masala (1991) and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1997), her documentary films powerfully and humanely explore issues of culture, identity, and exile. The Festival will showcase all of Nair's documentaries, including her first production Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979).

Her early non-fiction work largely focuses on the complex challenges facing women in Indian society. India Cabaret (1985) offers insight into the taboo subject of cabaret strippers in a Bombay nightclub, while Children of Desired Sex (1987) centers on the debates around selective abortion; the impact of arranged marriage and transnational relationships is explored in So Far From India (1982).

At the heart of Nair's work is the masterpiece Salaam Bombay! (1988). Marking her transition from documentary to fiction, this neo-realist drama follows the life of street children in Bombay, "children who survive on resilience, humor, flamboyance and dignity." The film received the Camera d'Or and Prix du Publique at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film.

Nair continues to make documentaries. The Festival will premiere her latest film, The Laughing Club of India (1999), and will also present a sneak preview of her new feature work-in-progress, Monsoon Wedding. Mira Nair will attend all screenings.

Science is Fiction: Jean Painlevé & Company

Mollusk Sex Chains? The Love Life of an Octopus? These are topics and titles from an extraordinary body of work by Jean Painlevé (1902--1989), a French naturalist turned filmmaker who transcended the constrictive category of science filmmaking and crafted artistic and surreal cinema steeped in biological accuracy.

Embracing the credo "science is fiction," Painlevé scandalized the scientific world with a cinema designed to entertain as well as edify. He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, and fan worms as endowed with human traits-the erotic, the comical, and the savage-and in the process won over the circle of Surrealists and avant-gardists he befriended, among them filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Vigo, and Luis Buñuel.

Painlevé directed more than 200 science and nature films during his lifetime. This series celebrates the best of his groundbreaking work, and includes an international selection of other important scientific documentaries and avant-garde films drawn from the annual public screenings organized by Painlevé in Paris from the beginning of the early 1930s until shortly before his death.

Brigitte Berg, director of Les Documents Cinématographiques in Paris, an independent archive founded by Painlevé in 1930, and Marina MacDougall, who curated the first U.S. retrospective of Painlevé's films in 1991, will introduce the films and lead a discussion after each screening. Following the Monday evening screening, they will sign copies the recently published Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé edited by Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina MacDougall with Brigitte Berg.

Reframing Disability

The works in this series present an insiders' perspective on disability. Long the subjects of film, disabled people here speak up and speak out about the world they inhabit, their community, and their art. The films and videos in this series suggest that disability is a social and political category, not merely a medical one. The centerpiece of the series is the New York premiere of Liebe Perla, a video that features the compelling voice of Perla, a dwarf who is the last survivor of Josef Mengele's experiments on her family during the Holocaust. It tells us as much about the present moment as it does about the fate of disabled people in Nazi Germany. On Wednesday evening there will be a post-screening roundtable discussion with the director, Shahar Rozen; Paul Steven Miller, Commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and Simi Linton, of Disability/Arts. The series also includes work by Seeing With Photography, a New York-based collective of photographers with visual impairments. The third program presents a range of expression, from a portrait of celebrated inventor Temple Grandin in Stairway to Heaven to a cross-cultural look at a disability-rights activist in Khalfan and Zanzibar to a bold, energetic video on the politics of disability in Disability Culture Rap.

Sign-language interpretation will be provided during the round-table discussion following the November 8 screening of Liebe Perla. The video is subtitled in English. The Child the Stork Brought Home, screening on November 4 and 5, is open-captioned as well, and sign-language interpretation will be provided during the post-screening discussions.

New World Border

Borders are simultaneously real and imagined. Whether physical barriers or symbolic boundaries, borders dare those who encounter them to turn back, cross over, or make their own maps. The films in this series examine the various ways in which borders - from the geopolitical to the linguistic to the performative - are erected, dismantled, and otherwise manipulated in everyday life and on a global scale. Nu Shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China and Du Coq à l'Ame visualize the impact of language on cultural and political identity. Seven Hours to Burn lyrically examines one family's struggles with cultural difference. The Great Mojado Invasion, featuring cyberpunk performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, tests the boundaries of the documentary genre with its ironic,postmillenial reversal of U.S.-Mexican relations. Waiting For Godot at de Gaulle investigates the story of an Iranian refugee who has spent the past eleven years in the bureaucratic borderlands of a French airport, and Stories at the Moth will expand upon this metaphor with "Border Patrol: An Evening of Stories About the Journey Through 'Customs'." (New World Border title courtesy of Guillermo Gomez-Peña.)