Santhosh Daniel
Read the December 4, 2008 interview in The Desert Sun.
Extended version:
A film series so nice, they played it twice. The Palm Springs Art Museum will be replaying the summer's Global Film Initiative's Global Lens film series for free every Thursday through Dec. 18 at 6 p.m.
"We had an incredible amount of people -- almost 300 for every showing," said Bob Bogard, the museum's Director of Marketing Communications. "This is a community very oriented towards film."
"The museum tries to provide a variety of opportunities by displaying and promoting arts," he said. "These films are not the kind of standard films that you would see at a specialty art house."
"We've had an ongoing conversation with the museum's education program, most recently with (Deputy Director of Education and Public Programs) Robert Brasier," said the Global Film Initiative's Director of Programs, Santhosh Daniel. "We love Palm Springs as a city, and Robert Brasier wanted a new energy in the film program."
The Global Film Initiative is a San Francisco-based organization designed to promote cultural understanding through film. It created the Global Lens series in 2003, a year after the organization's launch. Single films may participate in film festivals, educational discussions are held at high schools and colleges, and the full series plays at locations such as New York's Museum of Modern Art.
"It is important for people to experience other cultures, to learn how other people live their lives and more importantly express and create their films," said Daniel.
To discover these unique viewpoints, the organization travels far and wide to find new filmmakers. They focus on Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, as they feel these regions best need attention for encouraging filmmaking due to various economic reasons and the priorities of the arts in government policy. The Global Film Initiative also awards grants twice a year to help with post-production funding.
"We go to great lengths to cultivate relationships with filmmakers from different countries," said Daniel. "For example, we invested time and energy with a film community in Jakarta and have gone down to Chile to let them meet us and learn who are."
In India, they discovered the film, Let the Wind Blow, which was completed in 2004.
"We found out it was not allowed to show due to censorship, while it was a film worth seeing," said Daniel, who chose to add it to the 2008 lineup despite the film's date. "We weren’t interested in just the numbers behind it but what the film is trying to say."
Though the Global Film Initiative seeks new talent, they decided to allow one director to make a repeat appearance -- Garin Nugroho, whose Of Love and Eggs was featured in the 2007 Global Lens series.
"The Global Film Initiative makes a point to work with developing directors new to the craft or countries not known for cinematic industry. For example, Indonesia doesn’t come to mind as a film capital," Bogard said, referring the final film in the series, Nugroho's Opera Jawa, playing on Dec. 18.
"We try to diversify our films as much as possible, but Opera Jawa was a film so unlike anything we’d ever seen," said Daniel. "It has very creative storytelling -- a painting within an opera within a film and put in one of the most pristine settings in the world. It’s a sensory experience -- a sensual experience. Every film that we have in the series has a really sharp or profound angle and presentation to it."
"I can definitely see us showing this series next year," said Bogard.