2018 Naamani Memorial Lecture -- Nina Paley

Nina Paley is the creator of animated musical films such as the award-winning, critically acclaimed “Sita Sings the Blues,” a wildly popular film juxtaposing a 3,000-year old Sanskrit epic with a modern marital breakup, which Roger Ebert proclaims as one of the best films of 2009, leaving him “utterly enchanted, swept away, and smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original.” That astonishing originality is present in all of Nina Paley’s whimsically serious films, including the powerful short work, “This Land Is Mine: A Brief History of the Land called Israel/Palestine/Canaan/the Levant,” an extraordinary meditation on the region’s long history of conflict.