Catch rising stars

Ms. Festival features Indian filmmakers

Ms. Films Festival 2006 could be your chance to glimpse the next wave of hip, female Indian directors. And it might mark the beginning of a greater international scope for the 5-year-old Durham film festival.

The Ms. fest, running today through Sunday at the Durham Arts Council, features a curated program spotlighting shorts directed by up-and-coming, female Indian filmmakers.

Titled "Subcontinental Divas: Spotlight on Indian Women Filmmakers," the program features seven shorts submitted to the annual festival, which, as always, features indie films made exclusively by women.

"It kind of came about organically," says Niku Arbabi, director and organizer. "I started getting more and more submissions by Indian women, and a lot of them were really good. The themes in each movie are really different. I realized it was a diverse program."

Arbabi chalks up the increase in Indian films this year to spreading the word about the festival online, gaining more of an international presence.

"One of the filmmakers who submitted said they saw a posting [about the festival] on HollywoodMasala.com," she says of the Bollywood Web site. "It started to spread in different communities. Word-of-mouth has been a big help."

With the inclusion of the "Divas" program, Arbabi hopes more international filmmakers will submit films in the years to come. Arbabi, who is of Persian descent, would love to assemble a program of films by female Iranians for next year's festival.

"This is something I've always wanted to do, but it's always challenging," Arbabi says. "It's a matter of tapping into enough networks and word-of-mouths to get that going. I think one issue is that there aren't many films by Iranian women out there. And since the form Ms. Films has chosen is shorts, it's even less. I'm just one person with a really low-budget, grass-roots festival. I'm definitely working into more of getting that stuff out, and I'll be pursuing on that when the festival's finished."

On the "Divas" program, two films certain to catch the eye are "Vilayati Tarti (Foreign Land)," a documentary short about six Indian women and the hardships they dealt with when they migrated to West London in the early 1960s, and "Aunty Gs," a brief but humorous bit of cheekiness about the secret lives of Bay Area Indian housewives.

"Divas" is just one of the film programs that will unspool at the festival. Arbabi also snagged "Reel Grrls," a film roundup that came out of an after-school media and technology training program in Seattle. This half-hour, 10-film session will feature films that cover the theme of "media for positive social change." There will also be two sets of submission-based programs, showing off such films as "Freak Girls," a four-minute doc consisting of archival footage of female vaudeville and Coney Island performers; "Trina's Collections," a look inside the cluttered home of comic book creator and "feminist pop-culture herstorian" Trina Collins; and "Zest," a comedy about a teenage boy with dreams of becoming the next Julia Child.

Workshops will be held during the festival, instructing budding filmmakers on such crafts as Web site flash animation and stop-motion animation.

As you can tell from the lineup, the festival aims to attract attendees of both genders.

"The way I like to put it is it's a chance for everyone, male or female, to enjoy these films," she says. "We won't define what a woman's film is. It's all kinds. We would like more men to see these films."