RESISTANCE CINEMA Presents "SITA SINGS THE BLUES", An animated film written, produced and animated by Nina Paley, Narrated by Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya, featuring the vocals of Annette Hanshaw, (2009, 82 minutes)
SPECIAL GUEST: Filmmaker/animator NINA PALEY
WHEN: Sunday August 1, 2010 1:15 PM
WHERE: Community Church of NYC, Gallery Room 28 East 35th St. @ Park Ave.
ADMISSION: Free; donations appreciated
Every so often we at Resistance Cinema like to take a breather from our regular fare of hard hitting, penetrating, thought provoking, intensely serious documentaries and offer a reprieve, a way to “get away from it all”. SITA SINGS
THE BLUES will not only bring a smile to your face but will impress you with its ingenious use of animation and thoroughly original juxtapositions of the modern with the ancient.
Sita and her modern-day parallel Nina are in a pickle: both have been unceremoniously abandoned by their beloved husbands. Thus begins the curiously fantastic animation created by Nina Paley who tells the tale of the tragic 
love of Sita for her foolish husband as depicted in The Ramayana, coupled with Nina’s own tales of woe and parallel themes within her contemporary life. In Ms Paley’s words, the film is “a tale of truth, justice and a woman’s cry for equal treatment”.
The film is a sumptuous feast of animated splendor, enacting figures from traditional
Hindu paintings, as they play out the action narrated by the silhouettes of three Indian shadow puppets conversing in an ironic and frequently irreverent tone. The whole of this ancient tale configured in ultramodern digital animation is set to the bluesy 1920’s voice of Annette Hanshaw.
Winner of nearly 30 film awards following its release in 2009, “Sita” is a not-to-be missed event at Resistance Cinema! (For those of you searching for a social justice issue, Ms Paley has staunchly stood by her belief that copyright laws impede artistic creativity and she has made the film freely available to all).
(“Sita”)…evokes painting, collage, underground comic books, Mumbai musicals
and “Yellow Submarine” (for starters)…A Pixar or DreamWorks extravaganza typically concludes with a phone book’s worth of technical credits. Ms Paley did everything in “Sita”---an amazingly eclectic, 82-minute tour de force—by herself.” New York Times