Why is Nina Paley depressed? Her debut feature film,
Sita Sings the Blues — which she
animated herself in Adobe Flash — screened
to general acclaim at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It won the best feature-film award at this year’s
Annecy International Animation Film Festival and best American feature at the
Avignon Film Festival. Oh, wait, here’s the problem — she can’t find a distributor willing to take a chance on her unconventional, very personal film. (
This is a bad year to be shopping an indie.) Because she doesn’t have “synch rights” to the compositions underlying the
Annette Hanshaw songs that inspired the story — and now constitute its backbone —
she can’t give the film away. Having invested so much in striking prints of the film for festivals and making screener DVDs for press, she’s too broke to
pay the $220,000 it would take to clear the 11 songs for distribution. (Don’t miss the
spreadsheet showing exactly how much the various players expect her to pay to clear each 80-year-old song.) And now she notes, with tongue maybe half in cheek, she
may be on the hook for felony copyright infringement. Also, she’s newly
homeless. What’s an indie animator to do? Previously discussed
here and
here.
posted by Joey Bagels
on Sep 29, 2008 -
83 comments
Sita Sings the Blues is a feature film (in progress) combining the ancient Indian epic
Ramayana, the 1920's blues vocals of
Annette Hanshaw, and classically informed but modern animation. The animator wanted to envision what the Ramayana would look like told through the eyes of its much loved and much maligned female character,
Sita. This is not the first time the Ramayana has been retold from Sita's perspective,
Sanctuary, a play by
Hema Ramakrishna is a feminist reinterpretation that has garnered a lot of controversy. Retelling the Ramayana is part of the
tradition.
posted by arcticwoman
on Sep 24, 2006 -
7 comments
