Sita Sings The Blues

Written, directed, produced and animated entirely by Nina Paley.

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told."

Full 1080p HD and other file types can be found HERE

The story also goes that Nina released this film for free, because some giant company have the copyrights to the entire music of Annette Hanshaw (which could be a reason for her music being unknown, i.e. red tape) and demanded that Nina pay them for the music use if she were to be making money with it. Nina wanted to make new art by responding to someone else's art (that was recorded over 80 years ago!) but legally she couldn't afford to. If the money was going to Annette's family or children it would be different, but it's just going into the bank of a corporation that won't even notice it. Nina says:

"Well, there's a good answer to that. The corporations that hold these copyrights are media companies that also control most of the new media that comes out. Estimates vary, but it's said that 98 percent of all culture is unavailable right now because of copyrights. So the reason they hold the copyrights isn't because they want to get paid, it's because they don't want all the old stuff competing with the media stream that they control now. ... I don't think any of this is conscious, or that it's a conspiracy theory. All these rules were developed before we had the internet. The times are just changing so fast, business law isn't coping very well."

Nina quote via Alonso

Image from sepiamutiny.com