One of my all-time favorite soundtracks is for the Hindi movie Zubeidaa, which plays this Sunday at Broadway Performance Hall in Capitol Hill. I haven’t yet seen the film, but bought the soundtrack seven years ago as I was cabbing it to Indira Gandhi International Airport to fly back to a new life in New York. A favorite song is Dheeme dheeme, which you can download at SmasHits.com. This YouTube video song from Zubeidaa is called Mehndi hai rachnewaali.
An image in a Zubeidaatrailer I saw was just way too compelling for me to not buy the CD: picture a red chunni, floating lightly and loosely up into the sky, over a desert landscape deeply saturated in yellows and golds.
Clearly this wasn’t another one of your ho-hum, boy-meets-girl- now-everyone’s-dancing Bollywood flicks. Like the work of Deepa Mehta in Fire and Earth, this one promised beautiful cinematography and alluring drama.
And besides, I was preprogrammed to be drawn to the desert. I was touring India’s Rajasthan to capture images on Digital8. I got to screen the product of many hours of editing, The India Tapes, at Seattle’s Tasveer Film Festival in spring 2006.
Curiously I am still on Tasveer’s mailing list, and just found out that they’re hosting Zubeidaa’s filmmaker Shyam Benegal in Seattle this week as part of a tie-in with SIFF. Here are some of the things going on:
Zubeidaa
Sunday, May 27 :: 4pm
Broadway Performance Hall
1625 Broadway Seattle
Free
Shyam Benegal
Lecture on Benegal’s work in Indian politics and social development
Wednesday, May 30 :: 7pm
Communications Building 120
UW Campus.
Free
Alternative Indian Cinema:
Gender, Justice and Dissent
A panel discussion with Shyam Benegal
Tuesday, May 29 :: 7 to 8:30pm
Bellevue Community College
3000 Landerholm Circle SE
N201 (N Building, Room no. 201)
BCC and Tasveer are hosting an exclusive critical panel discussion with Shyam Benegal on representation of gender and subalterneity in Shyam Benegal’s films. This panel will explore some of Benegal’s seminal films that are structured around themes of gender, marginalization, and oppression, and the use of cinema as a mode of resistance. You are invited to participate in this panel that will be led by Mr. Benegal himself and members of Tasveer which is a South Asian Independent Film organization based in Seattle. The panel will also be showing brief clips from Benegal’s most noted films: Mandi, Bhumika, Nishant, Ankur, and Manthan.–Tasveer
Here’s what the You Tube song is saying…
Mehndi hai rachnewaali, haathon mein gehri laali
Henna paste is going to be applied, it will stain my hands red
Kahe sakhiyaan, ab kaliyaan
My friends say, now flower buds
Haathon mein khilnewaali hain
Are going to blossom in your hands
Tere mann ko, jeevan ko
Your heart, your life
Nayi khushiyaan milnewaali hai
Are going to receive new joys
O hariyali banno
Oh fresh bride
Le jaana tujhko guiyyaan aane waale hai saiyyaan
To take you away, your lover is going to come
Thaamenge aake baiyyaan, goonjegi shehnaayi
He will come and take your arms, the shehnaai (instrument) will sound
Angnaayi, angnaayi
In the courtyards…
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