Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley’s beautiful and insanely inventive animated film, is playing in Dolores Park in San Francisco, at 8:30pm this Thursday, June 11th.

If you can’t be there, don’t worry: you can either download the entire film on the Internet or order it on DVD. Nina has released the movie available under a free license, so everyone in the world can share it with everyone else. If you like the DVD, burn a few copies for your friends! (Or send your friends to the store to buy it, if they want to support the filmmaker and get a beautifully packaged disc.)

Disclaimers that I declaim with pleasure:

• Nina Paley and I set up the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire, where you can purchase DVDs.
• Purchases made there support both Nina Paley and my non-profit QuestionCopyright.org.
• Nina Paley is affiliated with QuestionCopyright.org (as Artist in Residence).
• If you liked the film, or even if you just like the idea of the film, we’d love for you to donate to the Sita Distribution Project, which is helping Nina both distribute the film and collect money to pay off the music publishers who hold monopolies on some of the songs used in it.

But if you don’t want to get involved in copyright reform and the fight for free culture, that’s okay: it’s perfectly fine to go sit in Dolores Park and just enjoy an evening watching a great movie, too.

(Thanks to James Jacobs for alerting me to the screening.)