Sita Sings the Blues

In celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, we present an audience favorite: Nina Paley’s gloriously animated film in which tragedy, comedy, and music collide. Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India and then dumps her by email. Three bickering shadow puppets act as comic narrators as these old and new stories are interwoven in a postmodern retelling of the ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana. Animated in a dazzling mix of traditional and collage animation style and backed by legendary 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw’s done-me-wrong tunes, the film layers a modern feminist commentary on the ancient Indian legend.

(Nina Paley, USA, 2008, 82 min., 35mm)