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, 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). And she has now made it avail­able on YouTube. Hence the visu­al­ly stun­ning film above. Nat­u­ral­ly, we’ve added Sita Sings the Blues to our col­lec­tion of YouTube favorites.

In the mean­time, check out our new col­lec­tion, 30 Places to Watch Free Movies Online

A nice tip from Life­hack­er. Canada’s Nation­al Film Board makes 1000s of films (includ­ing doc­u­men­taries, ani­mat­ed films, trail­ers and some Oscar win­ners) freely avail­able via the web and now the iPhone. Vis­it the NFB col­lec­tion here, and get the free iPhone app here.

via Life­hack­er

Jason Kot­tke has unearthed a rare and lengthy inter­view with the great direc­tor, Alfred Hitch­cock. The inter­view was con­duct­ed by Tom Sny­der back in 1973, and he starts with a good ques­tion. “All of the pic­tures that you do scare peo­ple. What fright­ens you?” Watch it above.

I had to give this at least a men­tion. Mar­tin Scors­ese’s Taxi Dri­ver (1976) is now free to watch on YouTube. If you live in the US, you can watch the clas­sic film star­ring Robert DeNiro, Jodie Fos­ter, and Har­vey Kei­t­el here. If you live out­side the US, you’re unfor­tu­nate­ly out of luck, at least for now. (There’s some hope that the film will get rolled out to inter­na­tion­al mar­kets soon.) Nor­mal­ly, I would­n’t know­ing­ly high­light a geo-blocked film — it’s not very “open,” I know — but this seemed a lit­tle too good to pass up. This YouTube pro­mo­tion is spon­sored by Crackle.com, a Sony Pic­tures site where you can watch oth­er major films online.

NOTE: You can find many great films in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Mark Frauen­felder, over at Boing­Bo­ing, has flagged a nice film noir col­lec­tion housed at Archive. org. All films are pub­lic domain and free. Among the 43 films you’ll find Beat the Dev­il (1953), a John Hus­ton film star­ring Humphrey Bog­a­rt. (Watch it here.) Archive.org also hosts a good num­ber of oth­er films, and I’ve high­light­ed some in a pre­vi­ous post: 35 Places to Watch Free Movies Online

via Boing­Bo­ing

A lit­tle bit of break­ing news com­ing out of Zurich, Switzer­land. More cov­er­age in The New York Times here.

John Hugh­es films. The Who. Now you’ve got the back­drop for my teenage years. This is for me, and per­haps even for you… (Sor­ry to those who can’t relate. We’ll be back on track soon enough.)