Films with: Desai, Rikhav

Court

"Winner of top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai film festivals, Chaitanya Tamhane's Court is a quietly devastating, absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India. An elderly folk singer and grassroots organizer, dubbed the 'people's poet,' is arrested on a trumped-up charge of inciting a sewage worker to commit suicide. His trial is a ridiculous and harrowing display of institutional incompetence, with endless procedural delays, coached witnesses for the prosecution, and obsessive privileging of arcane colonial law over reason and mercy. What truly distinguishes Court, however, is Tamhane's brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors; his affecting mixture of comedy and tragedy; and his naturalist approach to his characters and to Indian society as a whole, rich with complexity and contradiction."--Provided by distributor

DVD 11138

Lovely villa architecture as autobiography /

"Every house is haunted by the spirits of those [who] are yet to come, and of those that came before. We are all marked by the architecture of the homes we live in. 'Lovely Villa' is the name of the apartment building where the filmmaker grew up in as he studied to become an architect. It is an LIC (Life Insurance Corp. of India) colony designed by Charles Correa and represents an imagination of the ideal community for a modern India. The film explores the architecture of the colony through a personal narrative. Using found materials, like old photographs and drawings, and stories that range from family histories and other narratives--both semi-fictional and documentary, the film highlights some of the specific architectural gestures of the project. This is [a] film about the relationship between architecture, everyday life, family, coming of age, desire, and the memory of 'home.'"--Container.

DVD 13114