The Goddess Animated

The Goddess Animated:
Nina Paley and Zsuzsanna Budapest

Double feature of Nina Paley animation! Each screening followed by dialog with Zsuzsanna Budapest and question-and-answer with audience.

1pm: Sita Sings the Blues, 2009, Dir. Nina Paley
Paley’s award-winning 2009 animated musical interpretation of the Hindu epic Ramayana has earned widespread critical praise, a 100% rating on RottenTomatoes, and continued places on best-of lists. Roger Ebert wrote of it, “I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other.”

4pm: Seder-Masochism, 2018, Dir. Nina Paley
Loosely following a traditional Passover Seder, events from the Book of Exodus are retold by Moses, Aharon, the Angel of Death, Jesus, and the director’s own father. But there’s another side to this story: that of the Goddess, humankind’s original deity. Seder-Masochism resurrects the Great Mother in a tragic struggle against the forces of Patriarchy.

Suggested donation (at door): $20
Proceeds benefit the Women’s Spirituality Forum

Please carpool. Parking is limited.

Amazons encouraged to attend!

Capsule reviews of Seder-Masochism:
https://www.straight.com/movies/1138721/viff-2018-seder-masochism
"The Venus of Willendorf, Moses, and brilliant animator Nina Paley’s late father all join hands, Busby Berkeley–style, in a kaleidoscopic take on Judaism and the ways it and other monotheisms gradually displaced worship of female divinity. Covering millennia of religious wars, plus lots of plagues and pestilence, it also has the highest body count of any film in the festival. Of course, the violence is mostly regulated into shockingly beautiful patterns and repetitive motifs, all set to the music of Louis Armstrong, Led Zeppelin, the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, and 10cc. (Picture a mass circumcision set to “The Things We Do for Love”, and you get some idea of the rigorous madness here.) Paley, who does almost all her own incredibly detailed design work, mixed ’20s jazz with Hindu cosmology in the wonderful Sita Sings the Blues. No masochism required for this one, which is funnier and even more primally human."

https://animationisfilm.com/film/sedermasochism/
"Back in 2008 the brilliant and irrepressible Nina Paley blessed the world with her one-woman masterpiece Sita Sings the Blues, one of the most enjoyable and best-reviewed films of all time. Ten years later she is back with the playful, irreverent, politico-feminist Seder-Masochism, a musical retelling of the old testament Exodus that is provocative on oh-so-many levels. The film is a no-holds-barred takedown of patriarchal religion and the suppression of pluralistic female fertility goddesses in favor of a violent, wrathful, misogynist, monotheist deity – but done in a cheeky Busby Berkeley-style, with singing Moses, Pharaoh, and Angel of Death belting out hits from Gloria Gaynor to Led Zeppelin to the Beatles. Some will be offended, the rest of us will sing along in giddy merriment."