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Taxi-vala
South Asia Citizens Web
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Taxi-vala
Auto-biography
A documentary video by
Vivek Renjen Bald
1994: 48 minutes; USA
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Taxi-vala/Auto-biography is an experimental documentary which explores
a complex range of issues within New York's growing South Asian
communities. The work takes as its point of departure the intersection
between a second-generation bi-racial Indian-American (the
videomaker), and a group of recent immigrants from India, Pakistan,
and Bangladesh who drive taxicabs, twelve hours a day, on New York
City's streets. "Taxi-vala" shuttles between the stories of these
immigrant drivers and the self-critical reflections of the videomaker,
combining Hi-8 video with Super-8 film, color with black and white,
real time with slow motion, and straight talking-heads interviews with
abstracted images of the New York cityscape. While the drivers relate
experiences of migration and displacement, economic and political
struggle, and their quest for the elusive and illusory American Dream,
the videomaker charts his own personal quest for community with the
drivers through the making of the documentary itself. In so doing he
raises questions of cultural, generational, and class difference
within the South Asian American communities, and explores his own
silences with the drivers around issues of sexism, and inter-group
racism.
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Taxi-vala/ Auto-biography premiered at the Whitney Museum of American
Art's Fall 1994 exhibit, From India to America: New Directions in
Indian American Film and Video, which travelled to Delhi and Bombay in
December, 1994. It has since screened at:
Visualizing South Asian Diasporas (Rice University, Houston, TX,
March 1996)
South Asian Students Association Annual Conference (Brown
University, Providence, RI, March 1996)
24th Annual Conference on South Asia (Madison, Wisconsin, October
1995)
Queens Museum of Art (Queens, New York, August 1995)
The Chicago Asian American Film Festival (Honorable Mention, May
1995)
Asian Cinevision's Videoscapes Festival (New York, May 1995)
Desh Pardesh (Toronto, Canada, May 1995)
The Asian Pacific American Conference (APAC) (Albany, New York,
April 1995)
The Asian American International Film and Video Showcase (San
Francisco, March 1995)
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For screening information, please contact the filmmaker at:
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