Indian Classical Music and the US-ASEAN Film Festival this Week at the Freer and Sackler Galleries

Indian Classical Music and Films from Southeast Asia
this Week at the Freer and Sackler Galleries

L. Subramaniam: Master of Indian Music L.Sub.

Thursday, September 24, 7:30 PM, Freer Gallery of Art, Meyer Auditorium*
Pre-concert gallery tour, 6:45 PM, Arts of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas
One of the giants of Indian classical music returns to the Freer for his first performance at the Smithsonian since 1994. During the thirty years of his international career, L. Subramaniam has performed on violin with Stéphane Grappelli, Herbie Hancock, Jean-Luc Ponty, and the New York Philharmonic; written scores for the films Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala; earned a Grammy nomination; and received the revered title of Padma Bhushan from the president of India.

*Advance tickets sold out! Limited free tickets (two per person) distributed at the door at 6:30 PM.

US-ASEAN Film Festival 2009: New Films from Southeast Asia

The Freer's annual survey of contemporary Southeast Asian cinema brings together films that highlight the region's cultures through both fiction and nonfiction cinema.

The sixth annual US-ASEAN Film Festival is cospnosred by the Grace Heritage Foundation, The ASEAN Secretariat, and the Royal Thai Embassy.

Fictions
Friday, September 25, 7 PM
Freer Gallery of Art, Meyer Auditorium*

Jakarta proves to be the perfect setting for Gothic-style horror in this haunting psychodrama. Even Edgar Allan Poe would be impressed with the ominous atmosphere first-time director Mouly Surya casts over her tale of Alisha, a pampered rich girl smitten with a handsome writer who draws inspiration from the lives of his neighbors. When Alisha moves in next door, her infatuation with him plunges them into a vortex of obsession, ghosts, and murder, where the line between the living and the dead, fiction and truth, becomes terrifyingly indistinct.
Indonesia / 2008 / 110 min. / Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles

Agrarian Utopia
Sunday, September 7, 2 PM
Freer Gallery of Art, Meyer Auditorium*

Uruphong Raksasad's portrait of four seasons in the lives of rice farmers in northern Thailand might look like a documentary, but it is actually a carefully crafted fiction. To make it, he rented a rice paddy and hired local families to farm it for him. They then became the actors in the film's narrative about the vanishing practice of traditional agriculture. A native of the area where he filmed, Raksasad creates vivid, lyrical images of the land and sky that form the backdrop for his characters' struggle to maintain their livelihoods as globalism encroaches on their world.
Thailand / 2009 / 122 min. / video / Thai with English subtitles

*Seating for films is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Auditorium doors will open approximately 30 minutes before each show.

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