Pooja Kaul, a young writer and filmmaker from New Delhi whose experimental style explores the boundaries between fact and fiction, will screen two short films today (March 10) at 7 p.m. in Room 3-270.
"Rasikan Re" ("O Lover of Life") is an urban story about the cautious attraction between a young girl, Madhu, and her 40-year-old neighbor Kedar. The film--inspired by the Ragamala, a tradition in Indian Moghul miniature painting that attempts to visualize music--explores a young woman's desire, the correlation between art, music and life, and the rhythm of urban India.
In "Winter Trail," two Indian women on a train going through Hungary mix fact with fantasy as they chase an elusive figure from the 1930s--Amrita Sher-Gil, India's first modern painter, a half-Indian, half-Hungarian woman who died at the age of 28.
Kaul's work aims to adapt the voice of an ancient tradition to a modern sensibility and form. Her films, which have been called oddly unique in their lyricism, have met with critical applause in festivals and galleries.
The screenings will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the filmmaker.
The event is sponsored by the foreign languages and literatures section, the Comparative Media Studies Program and Harvard University's South Asia Initiative.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 10, 2004.
