The Lincoln Cultural Council (LCC) has announced that the postmark deadline for organizations, schools and individuals to apply for grants that support community-oriented arts, humanities, and science projects is October 15, 2013. This year the LCC intends to award about $4,250 in grants to multiple recipients.

These grants support a variety of artistic projects and activities, including exhibits, festivals, short-term artist residencies or performances, workshops and lectures. Grant recipients need not be residents of Lincoln, but a Lincoln tie-in is a plus and a Lincoln venue is preferred. All events should be open and easily accessible to the general public and should be events that Lincoln residents will likely attend.

The LCC strives to support a wide variety of cultural activities and is particularly interested in proposals that combine the interests and resources of several different culturally oriented entities so that all of our respective resources can be leveraged. Cultural projects are intended to represent in the broadest sense the study, pursuit, performance, exhibition, and/or appreciation of the arts, humanities, and interpretive sciences.

The LCC is part of a network of 329 Local Cultural Councils serving all 351 Massachusetts cities and towns. The program is the largest grassroots cultural funding network in the nation, supporting thousands of community-based projects in the arts, sciences and humanities every year. The state legislature provides nearly $2 million each year to the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC), a state agency. The National Endowment for the Arts also contributes funds to the MCC which then allocates funds to each community. The MCC distributes more than $3.3 million to over 5,000 projects across the state.

Projects previously funded by the Lincoln Cultural Council include:

• Travis Roy’s motivational talk on Living with Disability (sponsored with others)
• Buccaneers of Buzz: Celebrating the Honey Bee, a multimedia event and concert was presented by Rialto Arts (awarded a 2009 Gold Star Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council)
• A new mural celebrating language and culture at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High (sponsored with others)
• Historic New England lectures and presentations at Gropius House and Codman Estates
• Various concerts, poetry, and theatre performances, and even an edible wild plants educational session
• Startup funding for an after0school Printshop at Lincoln Public Schools
• Design and development of an interpretive wetlands walk through Lincoln’s conservation land

More information:

• Local Cultural Council – Lincoln page
• Lincoln applicant guidelines

…or contact co-chairs Melinda Abraham (mkabraham@att.net, 781-257-5353) or Lisa Putukian (lputukian@verizon.net, 781-259-0885.

By the Lincoln Library Film Society

To coincide with the Desai Foundation’s Discover India! festival in Lincoln next month, the Lincoln Library Film Society will present “Beyond Bollywood: The Many Faces of Indian Art Cinema.” Every Tuesday in October, the LLFS will screen works from Indian filmmakers that showcase a taste of the country’s output outside mainstream and commercial production. The free screenings will take place at 7 p.m. in the Lincoln Public Library’s Tarbell Room. Coffee and snacks will be provided.

Normally when we think of Indian movies, Bollywood is the first thing that comes to mind—dashing heroes, glamorous starlets, romance sprinkled with action and melodrama, with elaborate musical numbers every few minutes. But away from Mumbai’s multibillion-dollar Hindi film industry (the world’s largest), India has a vibrant independent film movement just waiting to be explored. Last year’s “Beyond Bollywood” celebration brought a number of interesting screenings, including documentaries, dramas, and experimental short films from various regions and time periods. This year welcomes a similar mixture showing some of the highlights from the lesser-known points on the map of Indian cinema.

2013 marks an important anniversary for the movies in India—the first Indian feature film, Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, was released in 1913. To celebrate this milestone, we will be screening the existing portion of that film (the first and last reels, since the middle two are now lost), along with the best and brightest of India’s independent film movements. Contemporary luminaries will rub shoulders with excellent discoveries from the past, and it’s all “beyond Bollywood.”

The films and dates:

Tuesday, October 1

King Harishchandra (Raja Harishchandra)

India / 1913 / silent with English intertitles / 53 minutes

Just outside the Indian holy city of Nashik stands a memorial to the so-called “father” of Indian cinema, D.G. Phalke, who released this, the first Indian feature film, on May 3, 1913. At once a starting point for popular blockbusters to come (as a religious/historical epic), a nationalist inspiration for the Marathi-language film industry, and a valiant trumpet of the 20th-Century swadeshi (Indian-made) movement, King Harishchandra represents the genesis of Indian film. Working with an all-Indian crew, Phalke depicted the story, from the Ramayana, of a noble king who lets go of all of his wealth, and even his own family, only to be rewarded by the gods for his sacrifice. What remains of this film has been restored by the National Film Archive of India.

Joyce

India / 1980 / in English / 17 minutes

In this student thesis film by Jill Misquitta, a young woman leaves her home to wander the streets at night. She takes shelter in a Catholic church, and the strange rituals, arcane chanting, and darkness of her religious upbringing come flooding back to her.

A Day with the Builders

India / 1973 / no dialogue / 13 minutes

Each morning, they awaken in the cracks between Mumbai’s high-rises. Slowly they set to work making the bricks that will form future high-rises. And so it goes, for this lifetime—and for many more lifetimes to come.

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Tuesday, October 8

Frozen

India / 2007 / in Ladakhi & Hindi with English subtitles / 109 minutes

Filmed against the snow-covered deserts and ancient stone villages of Ladakh (a Tibetan kingdom that is now a part of Kashmir), and with a Ladakhi cast, Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s Frozen is a haunting story that unfolds through entrancing cinematography and icy, razor-sharp sound design. Its chiaroscuro style, sifting through glacier white and inky black tones, matches the breathtaking landscapes that surround the mise-en-scène. Karma, a Ladakhi man who makes apricot jam for a living, struggles through financial debts and a harsh existence in the desolate high Himalayas to support his eccentric teenage daughter Lasya. Meanwhile the army is literally at their doorstep, as the family home has the misfortune of being located near the line of control between India and Pakistan, with helicopters and jeeps circling in the eternal glare of floodlights.

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Tuesday, October 15

Nainsukh

India & Switzerland / 2010 / in Dogri & Kangri with English subtitles / 82 minutes

Moments from the life of the 18th-Century miniaturist painter Nainsukh of Guler appear in picaresque fragments and rigorous, stately tableau. Here Nainsukh’s own work forms the basis of director Amit Dutta’s compositions, which he assembles harmoniously with natural sound and beautifully-rendered locations, to create unique paintings of movement and light.

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Tuesday, October 22

Video Game

India / 2005 / in Malayalam with English subtitles. 29 minutes

Part road movie, part rumination on cinema and memory, Video Game plies the rutted dirt roads of backcountry India, using an old black Ambassador car as a symbol of identity and obsolescence. In revisiting past footage that he shot, experimental Keralan filmmaker Vipin Vijay also revisits the shooting locations, where jungle encroaches on ruins, just as digital video overtakes celluloid.

John & Jane

India / 2005 / in English and Hindi with English subtitles / 78 minutes

Capping off an evening of experimental documentary work, this is an astonishing look into the surreal underside of working in a call center. Filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia’s mesmerizing and disconcerting John and Jane follows a handful of young men and women who are themselves chasing the dream of modern, urban India. While its denizens are drawn continually towards the flashy apartment buildings just on the horizon, the film itself dwells in the ghostly, neon-lit outskirts of sprawling Mumbai. Comforted by their delusions, these characters assimilate a dream version of American affluence in order to transcend their difficult surroundings.

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Tuesday, October 29

27 Down

India / 1973 / in Hindi with English subtitles / 113 minutes

Well ahead of its time in its plain-spoken realism, unscripted approach, and reliance on available light, 27 Down is still a strikingly beautiful, remarkably fresh film, a good forty years after it was made. It tells the story of a young man named Sanjay, fascinated as a child by trains, who inherits his father’s job as a railway conductor. His nomadic existence, traveling around the country, comes to represent his imprisonment by duty to his family, responsibility to his work, and his settling into an unhappy, arranged marriage. The high-contrast black-and-white imagery of the film bristles with the rhythms of everyday life in a way seldom seen in Indian cinema, while the tightly-focused lenses study the actors’ subtle yet spontaneous performances as though through an emotional microscope. A marvelous discovery from the past, 27 Down feels connected to the present through its naturalism, since rail travel is still so integral to the ordinary lives people across the subcontinent. Millions every day, in fact.