The 7th Third Eye San
Francisco International South Asian Film Festival covers a large swath of
subjects affecting peoples this turbulent region centered around the Indian
subcontinent. Kicking off Thursday and Friday at the Roxie, the festival concludes
Saturday ands Sunday at The Castro.
Searching for Sandeep: When we first spy her Australian
Poppy Stockwell is pushing a luggage cart through the wrong terminal of the Bangkok
International Airport. Affable, blonde and butch, Poppy has spent the decade
since coming out in her native Sydney trying to hook up with the wrong sort of
woman. “I’ve been out with a lot of women who are bisexual or curious and I
don’t want to be with women like that anymore – it’s just heartbreaking, ends
in tears!”
Poppy’s solution to the dating game
– as described in this breezy intimate video diary – is to pluck her dream
girl, sight unseen, off the world wide web, work up a proper texting, cell
phone chat relationship and then put the whole thing to a test in a neutral
country.
The Sandeep of the title turns out
to be a proper English/Indian woman: 31, still living at home (in far suburb of
London) with four sisters, a brother and parents who haven’t a clue that
she’s gay. “She seems a bit sheltered, she’s never experimented with drugs, she
hasn’t had any sexual partners, she’s not out to anybody and I feel like that’s
a really big responsibility for me – the thought of it is just a bit
exhausting. Hopefully she won’t find me too butch which is what I’m really
worried about!”
The airport meet proceeds without a
hitch, but the real challenge lies in Sandeep’s screwing up her courage to
bring the reality of Poppy home to her very traditional parents.
The video diary technique allows us
to penetrate the cultural boundaries and personal eccentricities that can be
deal breakers in any potential relationship. Poppy’s chatty, tell all style is
particular spot on when it comes to describing the women’s big sexual
experience gap.
“I don’t think she’s ever
masturbated. She hasn’t ever had an orgasm. So I’ve been encouraging her to do
some homework masturbating. I thought it might be better for her and for me,
for my sexual satisfaction for her to learn how to maker herself cum. She told
me she tried it and she got bored. I think she feels guilty touching herself,
giving herself pleasure like that. So on the phone just now I asked her to put
her hands down her pants and she did. And that’s a connection between us – it’s
beautiful.”
Searching for Sandeep plays
with short Mr. and Mrs. Singh. (Castro/11-7)
Warrior Boyz: He’s a tall, skinny kid, with a sly,
infectious smile, oddly camera shy. You have to look closely to see the scars
barely visible through his closely cropped hair. His guidance counselor is
worried about Tanvir, not that he’ll graduate, he’s 15 and in the 10th
grade, but that he’ll even be alive by the time he’s 18. If he lived in Hollywood,
this strangely charismatic kid might have an agent, be booked as sexy, naughty
kid on a Disney Channel teen show. As it is Tanvir is barely hanging on at the Princess
Margaret Secondary School, a prestigious academy in Surrey, the second largest
city in British Columbia and home to two hundred thousand Indo-Canadians.
In Warrior Boyz, Writer/director Baljit
Sangra discovers that a once sleepy Vancouver suburb now has a gang problem
rivaling that of Oakland. Like Tanvir most of his subjects are brown skinned,
often demure appearing boys who you’d never think were spending their
off-school hours carrying machetes and aluminum baseball bats. Tanvir, who’s
been kicked out of his home, and suspended from school innumerable times,
claims the reason he got his skinny body
into a gang was to earn respect. “You just have to
be loyal for people to respect you. Like, if one of my
friends is going to get jumped, stay and get jumped with him. Last week me and
buddies hospitalized three older guys.”
Vicky, an older kid with a slightly
better life expectancy, claims that even goal oriented kids like him find
fighting a perilous but necessary rite of passage. “Every time it just gets
worse – like you want to hurt the other kid more than you got hurt – (soon) it
goes from fists to knives to guns.”
This candid doc may astonish you
with its unsettling picture of a violent subculture that sprung up in what
we’ve come to view as our pristine, politically correct neighbor to the north.
The director will appear for a Q&A. (Roxie/11-6)
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Bombay Summer: First time fiction filmmaker
Joseph Mathew delivers a sensual and moving account of a tragic friendship
between three young people during this resolutely non-Bollywood take on a
languid summer in India’s bustling capital. Geeta (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is a
young career woman who’s pursuing what she believes is a discrete affair with a
struggling, unmarried poet, Jaidev (Samrat Chakrabarti) while still living at
home with her puritanical father and bookworm teenage brother. Suddenly her
cover is blown by the sudden appearance of a poor but beautiful young
photographer, Madan (Jatin Goswami). The trio start to hang together despite
obvious differences in life goals and temperament. Soon it become apparent that
Madan’s shadow life as a drug courier will fatally complicate relationships
that have gotten a bit too Western for this still traditional society. American
director Mathew (whose wildly eclectic work includes docs on illegal
immigration and a last season for famous old ball park in Baltimore) has
intuitive feel for the rhythms of both respectable and shady lives in a nation
that is just beginning to adjust to the mantra that money doesn’t just talk it
swears. Director Mathew will be present for screening. (Castro/11-7)