Ship of Theseus - share this post!

Together, we have proven a point - that Indian audiences are not only ready for, but directly demanding insight, invention, beauty and meaning in their cinema. The need for a robust cultural environment has been vocalised at the box office. It's loud and clear, and has forced a valid response - an expansion of the film's release to more cities. The wall of presumption has been dented, now it needs to come down. Let's not accept anything lesser.

Thanks to you, the film will now release in seventeen new cities next Friday (Surat, Goa, Rajkot, Mangalore, Mysore, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Bhopal, Indore, Nagpur, Raipur, Vizag, Coimbatore, Patna, Jaipur, Trivandrum and Calicut, in addition to the existing nine cities). We need to put in our best to keep this dialogue alive. This is about the survival and growth of all that is relevant to us, culturally.

We are more than just a film now. We don't know if this is going to be seen, in retrospect, as a small step or a giant leap. We do know that this would be seen as an opportunity for a movement - either taken or missed.

We need to come together to evolve a new ecosystem for profound, complex, meaningful, relevant, rigorous, experimenting, inquiring and beautiful cinema to exist and be accessible to each one of us - a privilege we don’t have yet. We can't afford hoardings or TV spots (the ones we have, were offered for free). We will depend on you to carry this further.

If the film has resonated with you, or held any meaning for you, then we request you to volunteer (especially, if you live in any of the cities the film is releasing in).

Here's what you can do to partake in, what we naively, ambitiously hope would be, a cinema resurgence in urban India -

- Make Ship of Theseus banner the Cover Photo on your Facebook profile.

- Share Ship of Theseus related content (reviews, posters, trailers, interviews, quotes from the film) on your Facebook personal profile, as well as the Facebook groups you are a part of.

- If you or any of your friends manage a Facebook Page, get Ship of Theseus trailer shared through that page.

- Change your twitter handle to Ship of

- Regularly RT tweets from @sotfilm and share posts from facebook.com/sotfilm

- E-mail the film's trailer, social media links and show timings to everyone you think would be interested in the film.

- Set your gmail status message with a link to the Ship of Theseus trailer/page.

- If you have a Youtube Channel, place the Ship of Theseus trailer link in the annotations to your videos.

- Share material on your blog - trailers, posters and links. Put up the SOT banner linking it to the FB page.

- Initiate discussions around the film in the online forums you are part of.

- Embed Ship of Theseus trailer on your blogs, websites, articles.

- Gift a screening of the film to someone you feel should watch the film.

- Organise group screenings of the film, followed by post screening discussions. You can shoot the video of the discussion, and we'll share it online.

- Call at least one person you know, who hasn't yet seen the film, and tell them about it, if it's not an intrusion.

- Innovate & improvise!

- Share this post!


Here are some relevant links -

Get images you can share from
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151677518312621.1073741827.562167620&type=1&l=e450dbe4bd

Official trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5xt0cKasDw

The atheist prayer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMvNfytKRBQ

Recommendation video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zCupteBlBo

Dialogue promos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAtua8-nRRU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjnAn11HdIY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3U03OM8DMo

Some early teasers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5JW92zk32s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRMvms9Z9Cs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaVRIoc8buM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPslufWdlMw

Our early short films and other work at -
http://www.youtube.com/recyclewala

Some third party content about us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=320L6meovVE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYRXlo1BODA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-2NtMakk5o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GApzllA7f5w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2QSOhwgjNU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRaMa-LJKto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkyJNapi7Nk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTi4AXpYH9g

10 Great Films!

I was recently requested by a site to list films I have loved in the last few years. It was a great exercise to prepare it. I felt dually obliged - to list five films that I consider masterpieces, for those who are not yet familiar with the work of Tarr or Haneke; and to make a list of five lesser known first or second features that are truly powerful pieces of cinema. With the exception of Kusturica's film, all the others on the list are films released in the last few years.

With all this thought put into it, I was shocked to see a disrespectfully edited and brainlessly truncated version on some sponsor's website! That is why I decided to share the complete piece on my blog - 

Du Levande (You, the Living)

Roy Andersson

50 hyperreal and urbsurd (urban absurdity, a word coined by Khushboo Ranka to catalogue the specific genre of surreal ironies manifesting in urban settings) vignettes seem to traverse a range of human misery, from alienation to apocalypse, and still manage to leave you with a sense of wonder (and even joy). The coldness of the fourth wall is reinstated in every frame, distancing the audience from the mirror to their desires, anxieties, insecurities and epiphanies. The cast of non-actors are studied pathologically in a sort of a human zoo. Every frame is a stunning piece of art, with a colour palette that can be described only as edible or dreamable, held together by the zombie like pale make-up worn by the actors.

The Turin Horse

Bela Tarr & Ignes Hranitzky

If nightmares are our mind's way of preparing itself for eventualities, this one prepares us for the worst - the end of the world, the suspicion that daily rigmarole is indeed absent of purpose, and the realisation of the complete absence of meaning. The tragedy of day to day existence is the other side of the inch by inch destruction of the world. From the haunting images by Fred Kelemen to the hypnotic score by master composer Vig Mihaly, the genius of Tarr and Hranitzky is in setting up the right triggers for every member of the audience to have their own personal enlightenment. If there is such a thing as a peaceful, soothing death, Bela Tarr's masterpiece is an insight into what that might be like. (At the risk of committing blasphemy, may I suggest that you hold a loved one's hand, as you walk on this edge of the world).

Underground

Emir Kusturica

This is one loud drunken Balkan stupor; baroque, gaudy, insane, epic, plenitudinous, layered with vodka wisdom and plum rakija insights into all things primitive - love, betrayal and war; produced by a country that exists no longer, directed by the super brat of Eastern European cinema. It is a celebration of devastation, a distilled (to some, reduced) polemic absent of political chicanery, a panegyric for innocence and longing. This is grandeur upgraded, it's Fellini ver. 2.

The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke

The American polemist Sam Harris, in his bullet thesis arguing the impossibility of free will, draws upon an episode of mindless cruelty to penetrate into the nature of choice and action, and the forces that guide them. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that Haneke chose a very similar episode in Funny Games to deconstruct the triggers in our environment that compel us to choose the course of action we take. From The Seventh Continent to The White Ribbon, the subject of Haneke's very disturbing constructs of violence, guilt, evil, fascism, conformity, and fanaticism, is indeed the suspicion of the absence of free will. With clinical observation and organised spontaneity, Haneke constructs a psycho-socio-political Rube Goldberg machine that has been set to motion by forces beyond the individual capacities of his characters, and will inevitably lead to consequences that are now a part of our shameful past. Haneke, while seemingly cold and punitive, is also an author of great empathy and redeeming power.

Holy Motors

Leos Carax

"All art aspires to a condition of music." - Walter Pater

In that, Holy Motors achieves the state of Baroque music. It is a thoroughly engaging, surprising, ecstatic, tragic, playful and self reflexive magic trick, constantly playing on your expectations from the real and the imagined. It invites you to participate in solving a complex puzzle, only to realise that the scope of the puzzle is far beyond the riddles presented by Carax and his namesake character (Leos Carax is Le Oscar ax). This film is a field day for a neuroscientist, especially a neuro-aestheticist. Wonder occurs when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and in that, Holy Motors is also truly wonderful.

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Taxidermia

Gyorgy Palfy

Surreal, grotesque and incredibly inventive, Taxidermia is a bizarre tale of the limits of the human body, a rich allegory of post war Hungary, and a stunning visual experience that is also an endurance test.

Dogtooth

Giorgos Lanthimos

Dogtooth gives us a glimpse of a new way of looking, while challenging (if not shattering) our long held beliefs of filial obedience, compliance and sanctity. It's a social satire with two perfectly delivered experiences - suspense and wonder.

Gulabi Gang

Nishtha Jain

My favourite Indian film this year is a richly detailed portrait of Sampat Pal, the founder of the courageous women rights organisation Gulabi Gang, a document of their struggles against rural Indian caste politics and corruption, and a re-invention of the detective genre.

The Act of Killing

Joshua Openheimer

A human experiment in continuum with the infamous Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment, only far more complex (and certainly not unethical). This film might well be the beginning of a long pending trial.

4

Ilya Khrzhanovskiy

Three people walked into a bar. Not a joke, but what a yarn! Old women in a village mourn the death of a young woman, their livelihood depended on her. It involved chewing bread into wet spongy paste, with their teethless gums, that she would use to make dolls. Was she one of the discarded clonal twin? (An indescribable film clearly - let's watch it as we anticipate the director's epic human experiment "Dau").