Sita Sings the Blues

Nina Paley, a self-taught ani­ma­tor, released in 2008 an 82-minute ani­mat­ed film, Sita Sings the Blues, that min­gles the clas­sic Indi­an myth, The Ramayana, with con­tem­po­rary auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal events, and it’s all set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Han­shaw. The film, which launched the San Fran­cis­co Inter­na­tion­al Ani­ma­tion Fes­ti­val (and was also recent­ly fea­tured in the MoMA’s series “Best Film Not Play­ing at a The­ater Near You”) has won awards and gath­ered a lot of fans. In late Feb­ru­ary, Paley hand­ed the film over to the pub­lic, releas­ing it under a Cre­ative Com­mons license (down­load it here). You can now take it and pret­ty much do what­ev­er you want with it (broad­cast it, share it, remix it, etc.). The only thing you can’t do is copy­right the film or attach dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment to it.

You can read more in the NYTimes about Sita Sings the Blues. The film will be added to our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.