Ladies? They Get Around! Come to Our Film Festival, Lovely Peoples!

Did feminism in India start in December 2012 in reaction to the Delhi gang-rape? Though sometimes it feels so, we know it isn’t true. Does feminism begin and end with responses to sexual violence? That’s another thing we know isn’t true.

This Independence Day, why not come together to celebrate a terrific arc of desi feminist activity? The world of feminist documentary filmmaking is fearless in its range of subjects. Fearless in its experimenting with forms of filmmaking and storytelling. Fearless in how it lovingly embraces all the different ways to be an Indian woman.

On the Independence Day weekend, August 15-16, The Ladies Finger and the experimental space Godrej India Culture Lab come together to present Wandering Women: The Feminist Docu Film Festival of India. The weekend will be a selection of this fantastic oeuvre that celebrates wandering women, women who cross the line, women who frankly don’t care that there is a line.

Come hang out at the Godrej India Culture Lab in Vikhroli, Mumbai and watch awesome films: from a warm 1992 film about one of India’s earliest woman actors to a 2002 film that embraced online culture a decade before it happened to a fantastic ‘YouTube Party’ – a slew of videos made by very young filmmakers who were born with a splash into a feminism-loving Internet.

Enjoy a big, dashing film about the big, dashing founder of the Pink Sari vigilantes. Or the stories of a group of daring women journalists in rural Uttar Pradesh, a butch female truck-driver in Gujarat, a young photographer who records the aftermath of a painful break-up and the lives of other bright, young women like her in Ghaziabad.

Wit. Truth-telling. Courage. What else do you want this August 15th weekend?

This exciting event is the happy result of some of the conversations that took place when we published our Feminist Documentary List: A Starter Kit (you’ll find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here) — when people asked, wouldn’t it be great if we could watch some of these all in one place? So with the good folks at Godrej India Culture Lab, we’re presenting a festival very, very close to our hearts.

Updated Schedule:

Venue: Auditorium (first floor), Godrej ONE, Vikhroli (East). (Entry from Eastern Express Highway.)

This event is free and open to all.

Check our Facebook event page for the latest updates and don’t forget to RSVP here!

Here’s more about the panel discussions.

DAY 1: Saturday, 15th August, 2015

HOW HAS INDIAN FEMINISM CHANGED DOCUMENTARIES?

Panelists:

Bishakha Datta (@busydot) works on gender and sexuality in the digital age, runs the non-profit Point of View in Mumbai, writes and films non-fiction, and is perennially interested in what’s not freely expressed. Bishakha has edited two anthologies around women’s lives in India, 9 Degrees of Justice (Zubaan, 2010) and And Who Will Make the Chapatis? (Stree, 1998). Films she’s made include In The Flesh (2001), Taza Khabar (2005) Zinda Laash (2007), Out of the Closet (2009). She’s currently working on #Selling Sex, a non-fiction book on the lives and realities of sex workers in India – and is half of the duo behind the online imprint Deep Dives.

Navaneetha Mokkil is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Women’s Studies, JNU, New Delhi. Her research and teaching are in the areas of gender studies, sexuality politics, and literary and visual cultures in India. Her articles on the non-linear imaginations of sexuality  have been published in journals and edited anthologies. She is also the co-editor of the forthcoming book Thinking Women: A Feminist Reader.

Deepanjana Pal is a Mumbai-based author and journalist. She’s a senior editor with Firstpost.com and has written about about Indian contemporary art for  a variety of print and online publications, including Wallpaper, Caravan, Business Standard, Tehelka and ArtSlant. She edited TimeOut Mumbai’s Art section for four years, was the Books Editor for the newspaper DNA and has written a book titled  The Painter.

Moderator: 

Nisha Susan is a writer and journalist. She is one of the founder-editors of the feminist online magazine The Ladies Finger. She was Features Editor at Tehelka magazine, where she also wrote on silent cultural phenomena like online sex tapes, why young women choose the hijab, how the poor take stock of the absurd poverty line, the rulebook of appearing Indian, and why men never grow up. She has been a columnist for The Big Indian Picture and TimeOut Delhi. She has written for Vogue, Elle, Outlook and Hindustan Times. Before journalism, she worked the NGO life in Bangalore for five years. Her short fiction has been published by nplus1, Penguin, Zubaan, Out of Print and Pratilipi and she is currently working on a novel. Follow her on twitter.

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Panelists:

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, love, desire and popular culture and spans many forms including documentary, fiction, print, video and sound installation. Her films include the path-breaking Unlimited Girls and Q2P as well as Partners in Crime, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Where’ Sandra, Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City and A Woman’s Place. She recently directed the cutting-edge prime time TV series Connected Hum Tum. She has written the internationally released Pakistani film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) and several documentaries. Her writing has been published in various anthologies including Bombay Meri Jaan:Writings on Mumbai, The Tranquebar Book of Indian Erotica, The Penguin Book of Schooldays, Defending Our Dreamsand First Proof and journals, including Signs, South Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Bioscope. Tehelka, Elle, Outlook, Vogue, India Today and Yahoo Originals. She writes weekly columns in Sunday Mid-day and Mumbai Mirror and is currently working on multi-media digital project on love, sex and desire. More at www.parodevipictures.com, www.parodevi.com, and @parodevi.

Tista Sen started her advertising career with Whitelight Moving Picture Company assisting on over 60 commercials. She is currently National Creative Director and Senior Vice President for J. Walter Thompson, India where she has spent over a decade. She has worked on Global brands like Unilever, GSK, Godrej and Johnson & Johnson and created sunsilkgangofgirls.com for Unilever, years before digital became fashionable. She is ranked the 20th most creative person in Asia and has won awards at Cannes, One Show, D&AD, Spikes, Clio, The Grand Midas, AdFest and Spikes Asia and a total of 41 metals at the Goafest 2014 which included the coveted Grand Prix for the Baybeat Collective. A jury member at the D&AD awards 2014 and Cannes Lions 2014, Tista is a student of English Literature and life. She speaks frequently on women empowerment and believes passionately in changing the misogynist mindset. This, and her love for interestingness reflects in the advertising she creates.

Moderator:

Dr Polly Hazarika is an independent researcher with interests in Yoga, Indian Traditions and Sustainable Living. She is a product of various women-only institutions from Shillong and Delhi and has taught at women-only institutions at the universities of Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai SNDT. In the last 12 years she has taught Literature, Theory, Film and Feminism. She is currently pursuing her studies in Sanskrit.

Here’s more about the films we’ll be showing.

DAY 1: Saturday, 15th August, 2015

11:15 am Gulabi Gang by Nishtha Jain (2012), 96 min

This documentary came to Indian theatres around the same time as Gulab Gang, a Bollywood feature film about the same eponymous women’s group in rural Uttar Pradesh and its iconic leader Sampat Pal. Unlike the feature, this film is fearless about exploring the grim everyday of women’s lives in Bundelkhand, a grimness against which the Gulabi Gang’s purposeful interventions seem well, the stuff of fiction. One critic pointed out that in parts “Gulabi Gang has the texture of a busy investigative thriller, driven by Sampat’s determination to see justice done.” But there are no easy solutions in this movie.

Nishtha Jain is a graduate from Jamia Mass Communication Centre in New Delhi. She started her career as an editor and correspondent for video newsmagazines before joining the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), specializing in film direction. She works as an independent filmmaker in Bombay.

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2:00 pm Manjuben Truckdriver by Sherna Dastur (2012), 50 min

She goes by the name Manjuben but constructs her identity as a male, macho truck driver. The film, which played at Queer film festivals around the world, spends a few days on the road with Manjuben. She is ‘one of the boys’ but she neither smokes nor drinks, as other truckers do. She has created an identity for herself against social, cultural and economic norms, yet has no stories of victimhood, commanding complete respect from her peers. To watch the film is to be endeared to its protagonist.

Sherna Dastur, born in 1971, is a graduate of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Some of her documentary work includes ‘Safdar Hashmi – 2000’, a film on India’s most prolific street theatre activist; ‘Rah Bahari’ (Those Outside the Path) – 1997, a film on the nomadic lives of the Rabaris and their resistance to government models of development; ‘Latur – An Epilogue’ – 1996, on the so-called rehabilitation of people three years after an earthquake struck Latur; ‘Jungle Bolta Hai’ (Voices of the Jungle) – 1994, a film on the tribal people of Dangs, their struggle for jungle rights, and their increasing marginalisation.

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3:00 pm Taza Khabar by Bishaka Datta (2008), 31 min

An eight-page fortnightly paper run by a group of women in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh. This is what Khabar Lahariya was when this film was made. Today, it is a weekly run by 40 rural women journalists and sells over 6,000 copies across UP and Bihar, grown past the wildest dreams of Nirantar, the NGO that nurtured Khabar Lahariya. To see where this fearless publication came from, watch Bishakha Datta’s documentary and enjoy the thrill of what community-driven, public-interest journalism really looks like.

Bishakha Datta (@busydot) works on gender and sexuality in the digital age, runs the non-profit Point of View in Mumbai, writes and films non-fiction, and is perennially interested in what’s not freely expressed. Bishakha has edited two anthologies around women’s lives in India, 9 Degrees of Justice (Zubaan, 2010) and And Who Will Make the Chapatis? (Stree, 1998). Films she’s made include In The Flesh (2001), Taza Khabar (2005) Zinda Laash (2007), Out of the Closet (2009). She’s currently working on #Selling Sex, a non-fiction book on the lives and realities of sex workers in India – and is half of the duo behind the online imprint Deep Dives.

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4:30 pm Dream Girls by Afrah Shafiq and Deepika Sharma (2013), 14 min

Dream Girls was made as response to the December 16, 2012 Delhi gang rape and the year that followed it. Two young filmmakers in Mumbai, Afrah Shafiq and Deepika Sharma, look at the ways in which women navigate their lives and the ways in which they would like to live it. Their reality is full of protest, fear, vigor, paranoia, chances and victories. But women are also dreaming all the time, and what is it that they dream about?

Afrah Shafiq works in documentary, art, research and design. Some of her work can be seen here.

Deepika Sharma is a freelance documentary filmmaker and a Line Producer. ‘Dream Girls’ is her first independent film. She has been assisting before this on various documentary, art and ad projects. Stories about city, gender and love interests her the most.

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5:00 pm Kamlabai by Reena Mohan (1992), 47 min

This film tells the awesome story of Kamlabai Gokhale, a pioneering actress of the Marathi stage and one of the first actors in Indian cinema. Born in 1900, Kamlabai was 92 and confined to her bed when the film was made. This is by no means a morose watch. The film is full of playful exchanges, memories, old photographs, music and Kamlabai’s reenactments of her favourite plays — and through them the fascinating history of early 20th century Indian cinema and theatre. Don’t miss the bits when Gokhale talks of taking on male roles in Shakespeare and desi epics. Filmmaker Mohan once said of this film. ““The film wasn’t meant to be documentation or a film that had to inform in a stodgy way. The film was her, she was the film.”

Reena Mohan is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India and is the editor of a number of acclaimed non-fiction films. Her first directorial work was ‘Kamlabai’, based on the life of the first actress of Indian cinema. This film won the National Award and the Best Film by a Debutante Director Award in MIFF.

DAY 2: Sunday, 16th August, 2015

10:00 am Scribbles on Akka by Madhusree Datta (2000), 60 min

“You can confiscate/money in hand;/can you confiscate/the body’s glory?”

These lines were written by Akka Mahadevi, the 12th century ascetic saint-poet. Scribbles On Akka gives contemporary musical life to her radical poems. One of the film’s central questions is, excitingly enough, did Akka wear clothes? The imaginative film is, as someone succinctly put it, “a celebration of rebellion.”

Madhusree Datta is a filmmaker, curator and pedagogue. She is the founder and executive director of Majlis, a centre for rights discourse and multi-disciplinary art initiatives in Mumbai, India. Filmmaking, theatre, visual arts, text productions; students’ movement, feminist movement, movement against communalism, movement for democratisation of art practices; cultural literacy, art pedagogy; interfaces between genres, movements and disciplines form the trajectories of Madhusree’s journey. Her film ‘7 Islands and a Metro’ has the distinction to be one of the first Indian non-fiction films to be commercially released.She has also served as member of the jury in various international film festivals.

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11:00 am Nirnay by Pushpa Rawat and Anupama Srinivasan (2012), 56 min

Pushpa Rawat, a feisty freelance still photographer, first met co-director Anupama Srinivasan, at a filmmaking workshop conducted by Srinivasan. Nirnay, which was made over three years, follows some of Rawat’s friends, who like her come from small-towns, now live in Ghaziabad and negotiate being a young woman and making hard choices. This startlingly honest film also tells the story of Rawat’s own breakup. No intimate space is left sacred and untouched by the film – we see them all – boyfriends, husbands and fathers. The film is dedicated to Rawat’s friends, and we see the utterly moving friendship of these young women with each other. Nirnay will remind you that sometimes unvarnished biography makes for the most powerful political art.

Pushpa Rawat has recently completed her MA in Philosophy, but her heart has been in filmmaking ever since she attended a filmmaking workshop by documentary filmmaker Anupama Srinivasan at the National Bal Bhawan a few years ago. That first brush with cinema drew her in and she continues to love the feeling of exploring the world through the camera. She was one of the filmmakers of the 2007 short documentary Kyon, a group project that went on to be shown at many film festivals and workshops. Nirnay is her debut film as director. She is the recipient of the TISS Early Career Fellowship and is currently working on her second film.

Anupama Srinivasan is a freelance filmmaker based in Delhi. She studied Applied Mathematics at Harvard University and went on to complete the Postgraduate Diploma in Film Direction from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. She has been making documentaries and short films for 14 years, often shooting and editing her own films. Her films such as On my Own, On my own again, I Wonder… and Nirnay (Co-director and editor) have been screened at various national and international film festivals. Her interest in working with children led her to conduct filmmaking workshops with children and young people. Since 2006 she has mentored several short films as a part of this. She is also visiting faculty at film schools where she does documentary making workshops. She was the Festival Director of the IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival f0r three years (2013-15).

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2:00 pm UnLimited Girls (2002) by Paromita Vohra, 92 min

Ever in the mood for a big, juicy, funny, endlessly curious film about the ideas of feminism? What is it that you say? Always? Oh, then it’s time to watch this epic documentary. At the time it came out, it caused some old-school eyes to roll, given its ahem *fearless* attitude (inside joke which we will explain in one second) to both content and form. The film goes between encounters with feminists young and old as well as conversations in a chat room among characters such as Marxist Usha, Chamki Girl, Atilla the Nun, Anarchist Ann and (ta-dah!) Fearless. For pure voyeuristic pleasure it is wonderful to just watch the interviews of some badass ladies such as Urvashi Butalia, Vina Mazumdar, Meena Menon, Sonal Shukla, Satyarani Chaddha, Shahjehan Begum. Then there are all manner of memorable vignettes such as the Superman School for Ladies.

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, love, desire and popular culture and spans many forms including documentary, fiction, print, video and sound installation. Her films include the path-breaking Unlimited Girls and Q2P as well as Partners in Crime, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Where’ Sandra, Cosmopolis:Two Tales of A City and A Woman’s Place.She recently directed the cutting-edge prime time TV series Connected Hum Tum. She has written the internationally released Pakistani filmKhamosh Pani (Silent Waters) and several documentaries. Her writing has been published in various anthologies including Bombay Meri Jaan:Writings on Mumbai, The Tranquebar Book of Indian Erotica, The Penguin Book of Schooldays, Defending Our Dreamsand First Proof and journals, including Signs, South Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Bioscope. Tehelka, Elle, Outlook, Vogue, India Today and Yahoo Originals. She writes weekly columns in Sunday Mid-day and Mumbai Mirror and is currently working on multi-media digital project on love, sex and desire. More at www.parodevipictures.com, www.parodevi.com, and @parodevi.

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4:30 pm Naach by Saba Dewan (2008), 84 min

While researching The Other Song (her film about tawaifs) in Bihar, Saba Dewan stumbled across a fascinating new avatar of nautanki. Some of the young relatives of the tawaifs she was interviewing were now stage dancers, dancing to Bollywood songs at massive, all-male gatherings like the Sonepur cattle fair. The film switches what one would imagine is the power dynamics in such a setting, shot as it is from the stage from the point of view of the women.

Saba Dewan is a documentary film maker based in New Delhi, India. Her work has focused on communalism, gender, sexuality and culture. Her notable films include ‘Dharmayuddha’ (Holy War, 1989), ‘Nasoor’ (Festering Wound, 1991), ‘Khel’ (The Play, 1994), ‘Barf’ (Snow, 1997) and ‘Sita’s Family’ (2001) and have been screened extensively in India and at international film festivals. For the past few years she has been working on a trilogy of films focusing on stigmatized women performers. ‘Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi’ (2006) on the lives of bar dancers was the first film of the trilogy; the second being ‘Naach’ (The Dance, 2008) that explores the lives of women who dance in rural fairs. Both the films have been screened widely and have generated critical acclaim. The third and final film of the trilogy is ‘The Other Song’ (2009) about the art and lifestyle of the tawaifs or courtesans.

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6:00 pm Ladies Special by Nidhi Tuli (2003), 28 min

Ladies Special, a warm, crackling film, places us in a local train compartment in Bombay, with working commuting women in a train reserved for ladies. We hear snippets of the everyday lives and battles of the women who travel, but we also share in the explosive fun they have together. As this description puts it, “The film and its makers join in the fun as religious ceremonies and birthdays are celebrated by women commuters who have been traveling companions for years. It would appear that each compartment has its own (sub)community, the women careful about boarding the same bogey each day. Lives are shared, gossip is exchanged, vegetables are chopped, manicures are had and clothes are bought as the 50km distance between Virar and Churchgate becomes a space suspended, unto itself.”

Nidhi Tuli is a scriptwriter and filmmaker, and owns a production house called ‘Rangrez’ along with filmmaker and producer Ashraf Abbas. Her documentary film ‘Ladies Special’  won the John Abraham National Award in 2005, and the ‘George Ragot love the train’ award at the Cine Rail Paris in 2009. Her other acclaimed films are – ‘Art In Exile’, ‘TIPA’, ‘Of Friendship films and swords’ and ‘The Saint of Chitrakoot’. Her latest documentary ‘The Saroj Khan Story’ 2012, on the legendary choreographer, was awarded the best documentary featurette at the Fiji Film Festival in 2013.