Date: Friday, November 18, 2011
Venue:  Asia Society and Museum (725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, NYC)
Time: 6:45 – 8pm
Tickets: $7 members; $9 students/seniors; $11 nonmembers

Dir. Vijay Singh. India. 2010. 64 min. Digibeta.

Post-screening Q&A with filmmaker moderated by Aseem Chhabra, entertainment writer, Festival Director of New York Indian Film Festival, and board member of South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA)

Historian-writer-director Vijay Singh’s latest film is an entertaining multi-layered portrait of India since its independence from the British in 1947 to contemporary times. Woven around a long road journey across the country, India by Song brings together history, colorful Bollywood song clips, live testimonies and beautiful images of today’s India to deliver a gripping work of cinema. The film fuses history and cinema so seamlessly that we see dancing and singing actresses, thinkers, domestic maids, farmers and cricketers roll in and out of the frame and dissolve into each other imperceptibly.

Vijay Singh is an Indian filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist living in Paris. Over the last two decades, he has written and directed four acclaimed films. The Guardian described Jaya Ganga, his widely-reviewed first feature, as “a mesmerising film… one of the most authentic depictions of everyday Indian magic ever screened.” Vijay Singh is also the writer/director of two documentaries, Chami and Ana the Elephant (Man and Elephant) which has been shown on nearly 100 television channels worldwide, and India by Song. (www.vijaysingh.net). Co-sponsored by Indian Council of Cultural Relations, New Dehli.