Flavors comes in as a tangy crossover cinema from Dreams2reality Films and Mauj Entertainment. It’s a quirky ensemble film that examines different facets of love and life among the Indian Diaspora in the USA. Honest. Witty. Light-hearted. Flavors is all that and more!
Colorful characters, stylish format, unique narrative that merges multiple stories all reaffirming the simple ‘Flavors’ world view: the world is small. Really small! This movie also has a large heart that promises you a world of fun!
http://www.flavorsthemovie.com/
A taste of reality
EX-VALLEY TECHIES MAKE COMIC FILM ABOUT LOVE AMONG INDO-AMERICANS
By Sandip Roy
Special to the San Jose Mercury News
The image of an Indian software engineer in a cubicle might conjure up a generalized vision of Dilbert comic strips or outsourcing of jobs, but those ``techies’’ also wanna have fun – and love and romance.
At least that’s what the breezy comedy film ``Flavors,‘’ which opens Friday at the India Movie Center 6 in San Jose and the Naz 8 theater in Fremont, aims to convey in an effort to upend stereotypes as it tracks love, cell-phone conversations and layoffs among Indian-Americans from California to New Jersey.
``We wanted to show Indian-Americans in a way that was both fresh and real,‘’ says writer and director Krishna DK.
Krishna and his filmmaking partner, Raj Nidimoru, were certainly qualified to tap into the lives and dreams of the thousands of engineers who changed the face of places like Silicon Valley over the 1990s. Both came to the United States about a decade ago from Andhra Pradesh, India, to study engineering and ended up as software consultants.
But the monotony of the software job gets to you,'' says Nidimoru. Every Indian is at heart a filmmaker,‘’ he says, and we decided to do something.'' Along with Krishna, Nidimoru made a short film, Shaadi.com’’ about the mating and dating habits of twentysomething Indian-Americans.
That movie was not about the immigrant wave of the ‘60s and ‘70s, when entire Indian families moved to the United States. ``This was about thousands of well-educated, well-to-do Indians, mostly men and all single and all looking,’’ Nidimoru says.
It was a situation ripe for a comedy. But Nidimoru dreamed of telling the larger story of this new generation of Indians making a home for themselves in America but sometimes returning to the familiar comfort of the motherland to find a spouse. Both filmmakers insist one need not be an Indian high-tech worker to enjoy Flavors.'' Information technology is just the backdrop, says Krishna. Even without that, people will enjoy the characters.‘’
The characters are based on the experiences of the filmmakers and their friends. ``These are typical characters you would see in an Indian community but not stereotypes,‘’ Nidimoru says. Two of them, Kartik (Reef Karim), and his best pal, Rachna (Pooja Kumar), burn up their cell-phone minutes talking long-distance every day.
The film comes with its own Greek chorus: The bench crowd'' is a posse of laid-off software engineers who spend their days drinking beer, dreaming about get-rich-quick schemes and answering calls from what they call subcontracting multi-shulti soggy samosa desi companies.‘’ (Desi is a term used to describe first-generation Indo-Americans.)
Sangita (Sireesha Katragadda), a newly arrived bride from India, is so bored at home all day that she begins to look forward to the missionaries coming to her door. And another character, Rad (Anupam Mittal, who is also the producer), has parents who arrive in the United States warily to meet their son’s fiancee, Jenni (Jicky Schnee), who is white.
Dhaval Shah, an Indian engineer in Silicon Valley who attended a screening in San Jose as part of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival earlier this year, says the film has its heart in the right place. I am going to recommend it to all my friends because I felt it was authentic,'' says Shah. Both Raj and Krishna have a similar background like me. This is not something where humor is created at the expense of typical software engineers coming from India.‘’
But others are a little more circumspect about what Nidimoru hopes will be the ``definitive ensemble movie about the Indian-American experience.‘’
Perhaps you have to really go through the dot-com boom-bust cycle to get it,'' says Ivan Jahagirdar, a film critic and journalist based in San Francisco. He says that technically the film is polished and has good cinematography, but Flavors,‘’ like many of its predecessors (American Desi'' and ABCD’‘), tries to deal with too many characters, too many stories. Everything remains on the surface,'' he says, and no one topic gets dealt with in depth.’’
Unlike Britain, he adds, where South Asian filmmakers struggled to make small indie films before commercial successes like Bend it Like Beckham,'' the dot-com money has been a fast track to the big screen for many Indian-Americans with an idea. He dubs this the school of films where the director, producer and actor are all the same and it stars his friends and the girl he wants to date.‘’
But Flavors'' prides itself on its professionalism. Its cast and crew are a mix of amateurs and professionals like Pooja Kumar, soon to appear in Bombay Dreams’’ on Broadway.
And Mahesh Shankar was a Bay Area engineer at Cisco by day and a composer by night. He eventually took a break from the high-tech world to work on the musical score for the movie.
Nidimoru points out that Flavors'' is no Bollywood song-and-dance spectacular where boy meets girl and love conquers all. It’s entertaining, but it’s reality,‘’ he says. ``When the guy loses his job, the scene is funny. But the problem is real.‘’
Flavors Not rated
Cast Reef Karim, Sireesha Katragadda, Pooja Kumar, Anupam Mittal
Director Krishna DK
Writer Krishna DK
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/9125718.htm
Running time 1 hour, 54 minutes
Where India Movie Center 6,
1433 The Alameda, San Jose; and Naz 8 Cinema, 39160 Paseo Padre Parkway, Fremont
When Starting Friday
Call (408) 830-9999 or
(510) 797-2000