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- Desi Talk/News India Coverage
- Star ledger Coverage of NJISACF 2010
- New Jersey film festival puts the spotlight on Asian women — by Arthur Pais
A beloved film festival held in locations in New Jersey and New York City for three days will have just a day’s screenings this year after opening with Vinay Shukla’s Mirch the previous day. Read More
- Home News Tribune Coverage of NJISACF 2010
- India in New York
- New York Times NJISACF 2009 Coverage
- India in New York coverage
- South Asian Times Coverage
New wave South Asian films break barriers
There was no melodrama or tears. The elaborate song-and-dance sequences were missing, too. Yet, the films screened at two recent festivals in the tristate area were quintessentially South Asian, representing the lives and struggles of the people in that region.Read More
Festival brings independent movies from across the South Asian diaspora to Edison
Sakti Sengupta, founder and director of the New Jersey Independent South Asian Cinefest, faced a tough call when selecting the event’s opening film this year.Read More
South Asian film fest focuses on the ladies
Sixteen features, shorts and documentaries from nine women filmmakers from across the globe will make up this year’s festival, which takes place tonight and Saturday at Big Cinemas Movie City 8 in Edison.Read More
New Jersey festival showcases reality cinema
What happens, asks filmmaker Sarba Das, when a bunch of hapless Hindus from Hoboken get mixed up with a gangster with connections to an Indian call center? “And what happens when a good Jersey girl falls for a smooth operator thousands of miles away?
Festival’s Films Go Beyond Bollywood
It would be a mistake to think of the New Jersey Independent South Asian Cinefest, to be held Oct. 9 to 11, mostly at Rutgers University in Piscataway and New Brunswick, as New Jersey’s own Bollywood extravaganza.Read More
The Fourth New Jersey Independent South Asian Cine Fest (NJISACF) 2010, produced by the Asian American Film and Theater Project, will take place on October 30, 2010, at the BIG CINEMAS in Edison, New Jersey, USA. This year the festival will be a one-day event and will showcase independent films by or about South Asian women from all over the world that challenges the stereotypical and traditional portrayal of South Asian women in mainstream commercial cinema. The festival will also feature filmmaker Q&As and panel discussions with participation from scholars and academics from a variety of disciplines.
An increasing number of South Asian women from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma, Europe and North America are taking part in film productions in various capacities – as a film director or a director of photography or screenplay writer or an expert in the art department. Yet, women filmmakers, and especially, South Asian women filmmakers, from South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, are one of the most under-represented in the history of cinema, at film festivals and at all other exhibition venues. Of all the thousands of film festivals across the globe, only about 10% focus on films by women. Women’s film festivals are only about 2% of more than 5,000 film festivals held in North America. How South Asian women are perceived in multi-cultural societies, is largely dependent on how they are portrayed in mainstream commercial cinema. Those perceptions need to be challenged.
NJISACF 2010 will feature a one-day film program showcasing feature, documentary and short films from across the globe dealing with issues affecting women of South Asian descent; filmmaker Q&As: and Panel Discussions on the following topics: a) Changing Representations of Women in South Asian Cinema; b) South Asian Women Reshaping their Identity : a discussion on South Asian Diasporic Women Filmmakers.
The New Jersey Independent South Asian Film Festival (NJISACF) is the first and only of its kind South Asian cine fest held in New Jersey. Asian American Film and Theater Project, a non-profit tax-exempt organization based in USA, is committed to the promotion, production and exhibition of film and theater works that reflect the diverse experiences of the Asian diaspora across the globe. Through NJSACF, our mission is to introduce our target audience of about 250,000 South Asians as well as the mainstream American population in the New Jersey-Pennsylvania-New York-Connecticut area to some of the alternative brilliant films that reflect the complex experiences of being a South Asian in the 21st century perhaps more truthfully than some of the big banner commercial films do. Along with this, NJSACF also introduces and promotes the South Asian independent filmmakers.
Visit our website at www.NJISACF.org or email us at asamfilmtheater@yahoo.com or call (732) 310-0236 for more details.
