Luck by Chance

Showing at MoMA: Luck by Chance, directed by Zoya Akhtar

Synopsis from the film's website:

A starlet and a struggler meet while trying to navigate through the Hindi Film Industry and end up changing each other's lives forever.

Luck by Chance is a slice of film industry life, in which self advancement is the sole motivator. Here, notions of superstition, fate and destiny may underline every decision, but it is the gigantic egos, the grand desires and the small opportunities that converge to form strange patterns.
Patterns that we call kismet.

In such an unpredictable climate, is success and failure what others define for you or is it something you decide for yourself?

The New York Times review is here.

Smile Pinki

Showing at MoMA and on HBO: Smile Pinki, directed by Megan Mylan

Synopsis from the film's website:

Pinki is a five-year old girl in rural India born desperately poor and with a cleft lip. The simple surgery that can cure her is a distant dream until she meets Pankaj, a social worker traveling village to village gathering patients for a hospital that provides free surgery to thousands each year. Told in a vibrant vérité-style, this real-world fairy tale follows its wide-eyed protagonist on a journey from isolation to embrace.

Smile Pinki won an Oscar for best short documentary film, and it moved one of the Freakonomics guys to tears. Audio interview with Megan Mylan here.

Firaaq

Showing tomorrow at MoMA: Firaaq, directed by Nandita Das

Synopsis from the film's website:

Firaaq is an Urdu word that means both separation and quest. The film is a work of fiction, based on a thousand stories.

The story is set over a 24-hour period, one month after a campaign that took place in Gujarat, India, in 2002. It traces the emotional journey of ordinary people—some who were victims, some perpetrators and some who choose to watch silently. As an ensemble film, it fo9llows multiple narratives that are at some times interconnected and at times discreet, yet all are united by their spatial and emotional context.

A middle class housewife closes the door on a woman desperately seeking refuge, and then struggles to overcome her guilt. The loyalty of two best friends is challenged in times rife with fear and suspicion. A group of victimized young men seek revenge as a way out of their helplessness and anger. A modern day Hindu-Muslim couple struggle between the survival instinct to hide their true identities and the desire to assert them. A boy having lost most of his family in the riots wanders through the streets searching for his missing father. A saintly musician clings on to his idealism until an evidence of civil strife shakes his faith.

Through these characters we trace the ways in which violence impacts both inner and outer lives. Violence spares nobody. Yet in the midst of this madness, some find it in their hearts to sing hopeful songs for better times.

Kim Longinotto Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art

The retrospective opens tonight, so it might be a little late to catch the first film (Rough Aunties, which just won the World Cinema Jury Prize in Documentary at Sundance), but it continues for two weeks, so don't fear! There is plenty of internationally-acclaimed-documentarian goodness to go around. 

Full schedule, and more information about Kim Longinotto here.