“My Choice” with Deepika Padukone – Directed By Homi Adajania
What happens when 99 women from varying walks of life come together to send out one powerful message?
A collaboration between director Homi Adajania and Bollywood actor Deepika Padukone, and produced by JSW and Sangita Jindal, ‘My Choice’ is one more short film made dedicated to #VogueEmpower, Vogue India’s social awareness initiative. Based on a piece written by Kersi Khambatta, the video has been shot by Tassaduq Hussain.
What can you expect? Imagine shot after shot of women including Nimrat Kaur, Adhuna Akhtar, Anupama Chopra, Scherezade Shroff and more who have made a difference in their respective careers telling you every single thing they see as their right as women. Why 99 women? “I liked the idea of telling people I originally had 100 women planned but God said the last one was too busy right now,” says Adajania.
“In my family, my father is the only male in the house, but all of us have a voice,”says Padukone. “I’ve always been allowed to be who I want to be. When you’re not caged, when you don’t succumb to expectation, that’s when you’re empowered.”
The aim of the Vogue Empower initiative, launched with the seventh anniversary issue, is to encourage people to think, talk and act in ways big or small on issues pertaining to women’s empowerment. The message is simple: It starts with you.
SUPERSYMMETRY
In some way every challenge we face is beautiful.
Original footage filmed with Kodak Super 8, Canon C100 & Canon 7D
ADDITIONAL FOOTAGE
NASA Archives
Prelinger Archives
Pond5 Public Domain
Videoblocks
David King, vimeo.com/dking
H. Lee Waters Collection
SOUND MIXED BY Tommy Mokas @ Casa Nova Studios
MUSIC BY Experience (Starkey Remix), Ludovico Einaudi Experience, Ludovico Einaudi
POST PRODUCTION Final Cut Pro X, Adobe After Effects, Protools
SPECIAL THANKS
Alyssa Monks
Christian Douglas
Christopher Stone
David King
STORM > Tim Minchin
In the confines of a London dinner party, comedian Tim Minchin argues with a hippy named Storm. While Storm herself may not be converted, audiences from London to LA have been won over by Tim’s wordplay and the timely message of the film in a society where science and reason are portrayed as the enemy of belief.
Written and performed by Tim Minchin @timminchin. Directed by DC Turner @dcturner. Produced by Tracy King @tkingdoll. http://www.stormmovie.net
NOW AVAILABLE AS AN ILLUSTRATED BOOK WITH ALL NEW ART! http://www.timminchin.com/stormthebook
THE FUTURE ANCIENTS > LUKA LESSON
From the book FUTURE ANCIENTS
http://www.lukalesson.com.au/
“In the future
the history books will study us
our cities will have been renamed
our languages slanged into something new
and this moment
will one day
be ancient
The future ancients
dig theoretical trenches between settlement and invasion
shoot rifles at each other from across the plains
and place prayers within the screaming bullets
they shroud their heads in mourning
and afterwards line their soldiers up in cemeteries like voodoo dolls for God
The future ancients
will be encased behind glass in museums
Greek ragtag squadrons
with backpacks
gas masks
and shards of Athenian columns for weapons
will be installed in exhibitions
of either terrorists or freedom fighters
depending on who it is that wins
this time
they will stand side by side
with wax dummies of ‘good men’
in shirts and ties
who never leave their suburban blocks
but are called to duty through computer screens
shooting unmanned cannons in far away places
and are called things like
husband
son
sweetheart
and Lieutenant
The future ancients
will have their artefacts locked in storage
shards of Molotov cocktails
from the Egyptian revolution
will be tagged and filed
next to Michael Jackson albums
smartphones
Playboy magazines
and the Australian Flag
The future ancients
will be found by future archaeologists
preserved and embalmed
in tequila and Chanel Number 5
alongside pop-star prophets
who thought they were somehow saying something new
this time
they will find them
praying to gods who believe in Science
on a planet of do’s and don’ts
of factions and fractions of us’s and them’s
and we’s and whatever’s
and maybe never’s
and never again’s
the future ancients will be found in tombs
of cheap liquor
in databases of tradition
on screens called culture
as relics of broken signals
They will hardly be visited as bones
but remembered
in the symbology of pixel
and paranoia
The Future Ancients
will be remembered or lost depending on what we decide
Since democracy has been paraphrased
sustainability called primitive
refugees criminalised by the first invaders
and Indigenous cultures lined up side by suicide
in prisons
like voodoo dolls for the future
the textbooks will study us
our cities will have been renamed
our languages slanged into something new
and our stories will be the only link left
between objects
and their meanings
They will try to twist and turn our histories
based on what they find of us
so our voices are the only artefacts worth keeping
alive
So whose lips will we honour?
on whose tomb will we lay our tears?
those that risked everything to speak
but spoke anyway
those that gave meaning in the darkness
those who not only spoke
but gifted us a moment of silence in this madness to so that we could learn to hear
ourselves
Those thoughts are your artefacts
your jewellery
jade
and bronze
and your words are your monuments
your stone
and bone
Parthenon
and Colosseum
everything worth leaving behind
In silence is how we surrender
speech is the architecture of fate
So are we pharaohs of fallacies
empresses of nothing?
What will they engrave below our statues?
In the ancient future”
Dante’s Inferno rap adaptation by Hugo > Canto 1-4
A unique poetry/rap crossover project adapting Dante’s Inferno into a rap by the ever innovative hip hop artist Hugo Farrant (http://hugofarrant.com/) who is also known as Robert Foster of Juice Media’s Rap News (http://thejuicemedia.com/).
Read Hugo’s artist statement below:
Dante Inferno – The Rap Translation – Canto 1
A poet regains consciousness in a terrifying dark forest. How can he ascend out of it? When he comes across his all-time literary hero (dead for 400 years) he realises he has a hell of a journey ahead of him…
It’s seven hundred years since Dante Alighieri penned his epic poem, Commedia, in which he describes in breathtaking detail a journey into three realms of the Catholic afterlife. So insanely inspired was this poetic undertaking, that swiftly after its printing its giddy readers added the epithet Divine to it, and ‘La Divina Commedia’ has never been surpassed in scope or style in seven centuries of poetry in any language.
Dante made use of a poetic form described as the ‘Dolce Stil Novo’ which translates as The Sweet New Style. He was determined to prove that the collection of unrefined dialects of the peninsula that we now know as Italy were just as appropriate for writing poetry as the Latin which all other writers of the time felt obliged to favour. He called this principle ‘De Vulgari Eloquentia’ – the Eloquence of Vulgar Languages (i.e. the eloquence of the vernacular). In exile from his beloved Florence, he set about writing the Commedia, and over the course of 100 canti, not only proved that the disparate dialects were up to the task, but effectively created the Italian language in the process, and immortalised himself to boot.
Over the epic journey, in effortlessly flowing and ingenious rhyme form, he shows the language’s ability to run the gamut of tones from the brutal and disgusting tortures of Hell to high flown and awe-inspiring visions of Paradise. So great was his prowess with rhyme, that he effectively placed himself at the top of the all-time great rhymers that humanity has produced for seven centuries.
However, when in the latter half of the 20th Century, in New York, an upstart group of young musical innovators gave birth to a style of music and a subculture called Hip Hop, all of a sudden, in the form of Rap, there arrived poets who took the art of rhyming to obsessive extremes, finally presenting a poetic form that, in terms of rhyming at least, could hold its own alongside and perhaps even surpass that of history’s greatest.
Immortal innovators of the artform such as Rakim, Talib Kweli, Eminem, KRS One, Mos Def, Nas, Notorious BIG, Tupac Shakur and Pharoahe Monch, took this rap rhyming to incredible depths, exploring all angles of their own vernacular, spitting intricate multi-syllable rhymed verses over irresistible hip hop beats and delivering their version of the Dolce Stil Novo to an insatiable world, and in the process proving, like Dante, that their Vulgar vernacular could have global relevance in its eloquence.
So, to this project. The basic agenda being simply to retranslate the Inferno using some of the forms of Rap – Multi-syllabic rhyme patterns, driving beats – to reengage with this epic medieval poem, and maybe contribute to garnering it a new audience. Of course, being a mere beginner in this art form myself, I have done my best to do justice to both the form and the source material. Any seeming deficiencies in either are in fact mine, and I apologise in advance.
With this in mind, I humbly present the first Canto of the Inferno, translated into Rap, using the hip hop mix-tape convention of rhyming over existing beats.
The beats respectfully used are
‘Agent Orange’ by Pharoahe Monch
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/agen…
‘Call to Arms’ by Harmonic 313
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/windo…
As references to the original poem, I have used the following editions
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Volume I Inferno, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling (Oxford University Press, 1996) – an excellent side by side translation with great commentary
The website Danteinferno.info which places the translations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), Henry Francis Cary (December 6, 1772 – August 14, 1844) and Charles Eliot Norton (November 16, 1827 – October 21, 1908) alongside each other for easy comparison. I have to admit I favour the Longfellow translation, and have made liberal use of his ideas for this piece. http://www.danteinferno.info/translat…
Finally, the superlative performance/lecture series ‘Tutto Dante’ from Roberto Benigni, in which he appeared night after sell-out night in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence to deliver a commentary and reading (from memory) of the entire Inferno. It has been an indispensable resource, and is available on dvd http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tutto-Dante-0…
I would very much appreciate knowing if you feel this type of presentation is listenable, enjoyable and makes you curious to hear more.
-Hugo
SLAM TV 