Friends

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‘Sunshine Superman’ to Premier at Toronto International Film Festival

Carl and Jean Boenish

Director and friend of Augury Marah Strauch has recently directed Sunshine Superman, a narrative documentary in honor of founding BASE jumper Carl Boenish’s daring legacy and life. The film, produced by Scissor Kick Films, Flimmer Films, and Submarine Entertainment, will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this September. Though the film is in large part a documentary, Strauch and the rest of the crew strived to recreate the emotional energy of Boenish’s life in the present:

Carl Boenish was considered the most prominent inventor and the “Pied Piper” of [BASE jumping]. I was enthralled by the story of individuals who push themselves to transcend human limitations. Carl did not believe in man-made limitations. He believed BASE jumping was an expression of the human spirit. He was a visionary. […] He pushed his own physical limits to make films. He was transcending the physical, to find the spiritual. He was flying. Carl wanted to share the joy of BASE jumping with the world. […] We will be playing a lot with point of view. […] We are excited about using stills, archival footage and our own original footage to tell the story in a way that feels even more real than fiction, yet with same narrative thrust.

The Festival runs from September 4th through the 14th; most ticket packages are on sale now! For more about Sunshine Superman, go here; For more information on the Festival, head over to TIFF’s website.

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MoviefiedNYC Interviews Ashim Ahluwalia

Miss Lovely, Future East Films

MoviefiedNYC, run by friends of Augury John David West and Myrna Duarte, sat down with Indian director and former documentary filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia (John & Jane, Thin Air), about his award-winning debut feature, Miss Lovely, recently released in NYC and set in the criminal depths of Mumbai’s C-grade film industry.

Ahluwalia talks about the business of Indian cinema and the emergence of the C-grade movie:

… [P]ornography is illegal—just to put it in context—any kind of pornographic material is illegal; it will get you a minimum of three years. It’s non-bailable. So when you think about these movies, they’re not B-movies, which want to be real movies; they’re C-grade movies that are made for the excuse for these sex bits to be illegally interspersed. They get interspersed at the cinema level, and not through the censors. So these reels, in the ‘80s, used to be delivered on bicycle at night and get spliced into these movies. So you’d have a movie, which people would be waiting for the sex bit to appear. I was fascinated by this.”

MoviefiedNYC provides in-depth film criticism, reviews, lists, and film suggestions that feature old, new, and upcoming films. The site also covers film-related events happening in New York City and around the world.

Read the full interview, “Making Movies that Matter,” here.

See MoviefiedNYC’s “Best Films of 2014 So Far.”

Follow MoviefiedNYC on Facebook.

Follow MovifiedNYC on Twitter

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Shelly Oria in The Paris Review; New Book Forthcoming

Shelly Oria, photo by T Kira Madden

Friend of Augury and fiction author Shelly Oria, whose short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv O, is forthcoming from FSG and Random House Canada (November 2014), appears in this summer’s issue of The Paris Review with her short story, “My Wife, in Converse,” quoted here from TPR’s site:

The last time we had sex, it was cold out and they said a storm was coming. My wife was shivering in fear, making a list to steady herself. For a while I was trying to cross things off—candles, eight gallons of water, move things away from windows. Check, I would say cheerfully at her, check check check. But the more I crossed off, the longer the list got, and the more anxious my wife seemed. She was sitting on our bed, her upper body low like it was trying to reach her knees. I stood close behind her, put my hands on her shoulders. Honey, I said, and she tilted her head back and looked up to meet my eyes. There was such fear in her face, and I hadn’t thought this through; ‘honey’ was all I had.”

Read more here, or you can find the full short story in The Paris Review’s Summer 2014 issue, also featuring new work by Joy Williams, Henri Cole, Zadie Smith, Jane Hirshfield, and more.

For more on Oria and her work, visit her website.

Pre-order the upcoming New York 1, Tel Aviv 0.

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Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, is forthcoming from FSG and Random House Canada in November. Shelly’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, and fivechapters, among other places, and has won a number of awards, including the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Shelly curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village and teaches fiction at Pratt Institute, where she also codirects the Writers’ Forum.