A screening of the short film Twitch will precede the screening of The Namesake.
Twitch (1999)
Director: Amit Desai
Runtime: 5 minutes
Country: USA
Language: English
Rating: TBA
Full Synopsis
“Come hear the legend of Zulu George!” So begins this scrappy gem of ethnofiction shot on 16mm B&W reversal film deep in the urban wilds of Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Son of Indian immigrants to Queens, New York, artist and filmmaker Amit Desai uses caricature and the hyperbole of myth to highlight the ways in which racialised and gendered projections move bodies through space and architect our collective imagination.
The Namesake (2006)
Director: Mira Nair
Runtime: 122 minutes
Country: USA, India, Japan
Language: English, Bengali
Rating: NC16 (Scenes of Intimacy and Some Drug Use)
Full Synopsis
Based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake has a powerhouse of acting talent with Irrfan Khan and Tabu playing Ashok and Ashima Ganguli, Bengali immigrants to the United States. The film centres on the coming of age struggles of their son Gogol Ganguli, or “Nikhil” as the case may be, (played by Kal Penn, of Harold and Kumar fame) as he navigates his identity between the US and India.
Images courtesy of © 2022 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and its related entities. All rights reserved.
This film is featured in the strand Tradition Re-framed, part of the Constellating Histories: Encountering Asian American Diasporas Onscreen programme. For the full programme lineup please click here.
Oldham Theatre’s opening hours
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