January 28, 2003
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Filmmaker Aradhana Seth presents her film DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy, with the filmmaker Aradhana Seth
- Arundhati Roy is the Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things and Power Politics
- The film chronicles Roy’s fight to stop the massive Narmada dam project in India
- Thursday, March 6
- 7:30 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
- General public $6, UCSB students $5
- Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Director Aradhana Seth will introduce a screening of her powerful documentary film DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy on Thursday, March 6 at 7:30 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall and hold a question and answer session after the film. This is a joint presentation of UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. DAM/AGE traces celebrated Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s bold and controversial campaign against the Narmada dam project in India that will displace hundreds of thousands of people. The film shows how Roy chose to use her fame to stand up to powerful interests backed by both multinational corporate capital and the state. Roy believes the fight in the Narmada Valley is not just the story of modern India, but a global struggle about “who counts, who doesn’t, what matters, what doesn’t, what counts as a cost, what doesn’t, what counts as collateral damage, what doesn’t.”
Aradhana Seth is a documentary filmmaker and production designer. Seth grew up in India and has worked extensively there and in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. She began her career in feature film in 1988, working as an assistant director on In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which chronicles the life of students in the hip Delhi School of Architecture. On that film she first met its writer, Arundhati Roy. Her routinely praised production design credits include Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996), Earth (1998) and the forthcoming Water (2003).
Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1998. She has also published The Cost of Living, a book of two essays critical of India’s massive dam and irrigation projects, as well as India’s successful detonation of a nuclear bomb. In her most recent book Power Politics, Roy challenges the idea that only experts can speak out on such urgent matters as nuclear war, the privatization of India’s power supply by Enron and issues like the Narmada dam project. Roy is a recent winner of the Lannan Foundation’s Prize for Cultural Freedom, a $350,000 award that Roy has announced will be shared by 50 people’s movements, publications, educational institutions, theater groups and individuals in India.
The UK Guardian wrote that DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy “traced how the author’s vociferous campaigning against the Narmada dam project in India led to a conviction for criminal contempt and her subsequent imprisonment....Aradhana Seth’s inspiring documentary charted Roy’s progress, and her poetry, with bold accomplishment. This was an urgent and vital film.”
This event is co-presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in association with the Worldwatch Institute. Tickets are $6 for the general public and $5 for UCSB students and are on sale now at the Arts & Lectures Ticket Office.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
For more information about the Film Festival,
visit www.sbfilmfestival.org.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.