Nina Sings No Blues
Sita Sings the Blues, written, directed and animated by Nina Paley, has won first prize (Cristal) for Best Feature Film at the Annecy Animation Festival in France. Nina, as local cartoon fans may remember, moved to Santa Cruz back in 1988 to create her own independent comic strip Nina’s Adventures which ran in alternative weeklies for five years. She graduated to a syndicated strip, called Fluff, but ultimately, she grew frustrated with the mainstream comics scene, and by the late 1990s had begun to experiment with animation.
For the past five years, in her new home in Manhattan, she’s single-handedly created Sita, a retelling of the ancient Indian epic The Ramayana, which tells the story of Rama and explores the concept of dharma. Nina made the potentially controversial choice of retelling the story from the point of view of Rama’s wife Sita, leavened the story with insights from a tumultous time in her own life, and created a brilliant 72-minute film. Congratulations Nina!
