We are longtime fans of short films. EatDrinkFilms Editor Johnny Ray Huston, Publisher Gary Meyer and Associate Editor Tien-Tien Jong have years of experience curating shorts programs for theaters, film festivals, museums and galleries. We have decided to offer our readers a weekly selected short.

We had ideas for several names for this weekly feature, but it was the inspiration of Bart Simpson that won out.

Our first week’s two offerings are inspired by the release of the beautifully-restored Indian classics, The Apu Trilogy .

This week, we launch with an exclusive free showing (for a limited time) of the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated Salim Baba , which has screened at four-dozen international film festivals. Are you a fan of Cinema Paradiso ? Then don’t miss Salim Baba . If you love movies or are interested in world cultures, it is a must-see.

Salim Muhammad is a 55-year-old man who lives in North Kolkata with his wife and five children. Since the age of ten, he has made a living screening discarded film scraps for the kids in his surrounding neighborhoods, using an old Lumiere hand-cranked projector that he inherited from his father. A pragmatic businessman as well as a cinephile, Salim runs his projector with his sons in the hopes that they will carry on his legacy of showing films to the local children.

(15 minutes, 2007, India/USA)

The filmmakers:

Timothy Sternberg (director, editor) started working in the editing rooms of Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studios in San Francisco while still in high school. After moving to New York, he’s worked in positions as diverse as sound effects recordist on Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle and Robert Benton’s The Human Stain, re-editing the 1992 Academy Award winning Mediterraneo for US release and acting as script consultant for the IFP and American Zoetrope. He has worked as music editor on Milos Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts and the Academy Award winning documentary The Blood of Yingzhou District, directed by Ruby Yang. Salim Baba, shot in four days in Kolkata, India was his first film as a director. He co-directed HBO’s El Espiritu de la Salsa, which premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. He recently adapted Hanif Kureishi’s novella Gabriel’s Gift into a feature script, as well as edited director Brendan Toller’s feature doc Danny Says, which premiered to great acclaim at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival. He was co-director, co-producer and editor on the 2015 release Dreaming Against the World.

Francisco Bello (producer, camera) studied at the Cooper Union School of Art and has since worked in the post-production of feature films for Kevin Smith, Michael Moore, and George Butler among others. Francisco produced and edited War Don Don, which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival and was nominated for two Emmys. In 2012, Francisco completed his work as writer, producer, editor of Code of the West, which premiered at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival. He spent most of 2012 editing Best Kept Secret (2013 Gotham Audience Award Nomination, 2014 Peabody Award winner, POV broadcast) and Our Nixon (2013 Rotterdam, SXSW, New Directors New Films, Karen Schmeer Award for Excellence in Documentary Editing, CNN broadcast). Francisco recently completed co-directing Dreaming Against the World with the reunited creative team behind Salim Baba, as well as developing his feature directorial debut, The Murder and the Journalists.

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Click here for an interview with director Sternberg.

Their Ropa Vieja Films website: http://www.rv-films.com/rvf/.