The long-delayed documentary about British rapper, songwriter MIA will have its world premiere at next year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The world’s largest independent film festival will run from 18-28 January at various locations in Park City Utah featuring several music-related films among the line-up of 110 films – 99 of them world premieres.
M.I.A.’s documentary, directed by Stephen Loveridge who studied with her at Saint Martins in London, has taken many years to complete and in a leaked trailer on Youtube we see appearances by Kanye West and Diplo, as well as a clip featuring Palitha Kohona, the then Foreign Secretary of Sri Lanka.
“MIA is a great artiste and we wish her well,” says Kohona. “”She is misinformed (about the situation in Sri Lanka). It is best if she stays what she is good at, which is music, not politics.”
According to Sundance website, the doc would feature “a never before seen cache of personal footage spanning decades” and it will be “an intimate portrait of the Sri Lankan artist and musician who continues to shatter conventions.”
It is hard for M.I.A. to be out of the subject that Kohona excelled in as she is a child misplaced by ethnic politics. Revolution is in her blood. In the trailer she says, “This is what happens to a kid whose dad becomes a terrorist” referring to her father who went with the whole family when she was six months old to Sri Lanka, a country nose-diving into violence and chaos.
‘Footage of this crazy mess is about my personal life. They’re all interesting things you’re not going to get from a Beyoncé documentary. It’s just so complicated. I can’t even get my head around that’
Talking about the long-gestating period of the doc, M.I.A told the FACT website last March that the film may take a long time to finish after the project stalled in 2013 “following a dispute that led director Loveridge to claim he’d ‘rather die’ than complete work on it”.
“I don’t know what’s happening with my doc,” the rapper said. “I haven’t talked to Steve for years. I did speak to him a few months ago but I think the documentary about me might take another 10 years.”
Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam was born in Hounslow, west London, in July 1975. When she was just six months old, her father, Arul, decided to move the family back to Sri Lanka to join the fight for an independent Tamil state in the north of the country.
In the video she describes him as a founding member of a revolutionary group which is the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS). There is also a black and white grainy clip of a family argument in which her father says “I never left the family, man. You all left me and came. That’s the whole problem.” Then a woman’s voice says ‘stop recording.’
Her father who was a well known Tamil writer had heard too many tales of his fellow Tamils being oppressed and killed and went to fight the government and, formed the EROS, she says in the FACT interview.
“It’s a weird film, and it’s not easy to cut together…I’ve documented a lot of things myself as a filmmaker. If you want a rockumentary, that’s in there,” she said in an interview. “Then there’s a political angle, which is the documentary I wanted to shoot on Sri Lanka. Then there’s footage I shot when my brother came out of prison when he was like 16. And footage of this crazy mess with my personal life. They’re all interesting things you’re not going to get from a Beyoncé documentary. It’s just so complicated. I can’t even get my head around that”.
In a recent Facebook post she ruminates: “They say I’m irrelevant, they say I am stupid for not talking like them or acting like them. I’ve lived every rung of this society. I was I’ve been the refugee, the immigrant, the working class, the famous, the privileged, the elite, the hippy, the criminal, the establishment, the rebel…racist, the terrorist, called a paki…paid me less never giving me credit where it’s due! I’m not for the weak hearted!”
Sound like some of her lyrics! Hope the documentary will tell us who the real Matangi is!
