PINK LUDOOS

US Premiere

Canada 2004 | 90mins | Video Color

In person: Director Gaurav Seth

Growing up in the cracks between cultures is about more than the curry in your lunchbox. Young, feisty and Indo Canadian, Gugan is about to become the gossip of the gurdwara when she realizes she is pregnant with triplets and momma, don't preach, she's keeping the babies. Mother (BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM's Shaheen Khan) has her hands full with her grocery store, an alcoholic husband and trying to find "good engineer" sons-in-law. To add to the bedlam, Gugan's already been betrothed to a young man by her dying grandmother in India.

Instead of the usual intergenerational mother/daughter fireworks, Gaurav Seth's first feature after A PASSAGE TO OTTAWA (SFIAAFF '02) ventures into more daring territory, taking on pre-marital sex, abortion, alcoholism, religion, the Madonna-whore complex and gender discrimination. That's a lot of hot buttons to press in one film made over 16 days with a shoestring budget, but PINK LUDOOS is helped along the way by some palmistry, a mysterious hunk who rises Venus-like from the sea, "magic water" and an eclipse.

Sometimes comic, sometimes earnest, sometimes all-out melodrama, PINK LUDOOS has its heart in the right place and its Kleenex handy as it takes on the challenge of being brown in the New World; or, as Mom puts it, "Jesus was white, what did he know?"

—Sandip Roy

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