Come to the Chicago South Asian Film Festival!

If you're in the midwestern United States—or have time and money to get yourself here—I highly recommend attending the Chicago South Asian Film Festival, running September 20–23! To tempt you, the schedule is available here (with trailers collected here—which is such a good idea) and includes several world and US premieres of films with actors like Shabana Azmi, Lilete Dubey, Deepti Naval, Victor Banerjee, Samrat Chakrabarti, and Parvin Dabas.

Due to work commitments I can only make it to the Saturday and Sunday events (and possibly Friday night, if I play my cards right), but you luckier types will get to enjoy Heroine as the gala opening film on the 20th. Frankly I'm not sure how I feel about Heroine: I love Kareena and the idea of her in such a film is fantastic, and I thought Page 3 was okay, but Fashion is one of the worst films I have ever seen and it violated so many principles of storytelling and basic human decency that trying out something else made by some of the same creative team is not in the tiniest bit appealing.

The list of artists attending is also pretty interesting and I am already debating how likely it is that I will be rendered basically speechless and very shy in the presence of Farooq "Fake-Pretend Parallel Cinema Boyfriend #1" Shaikh (just as I was for Shashi back in March).

I had a great time at the 2011 festival and am really looking forward to what's in store this year. Let me know if you'll be there too and want to grab coffee (or stalk discretely) between shows!