KRAANTI: Visions of Resistance (August 3-15), has been extended and will be in our Virtual Cinema until August 22!
In conjunction with SAAID (South Asian Artists in Diaspora), a new collective of interdisciplinary artists formed in the wake of the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic across South Asia, Maysles Documentary Center is excited to co-present KRAANTI—a program of 9 documentaries curated by Devika Girish and Bedatri Datta Choudhury exploring the long-standing legacy of grassroots resistance against the violences of caste, capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism in India. At a time when these regimes of power are consolidated by the neglect of the Indian state and its ethnonationalist project of Hindutva, as well as the geopolitics of vaccine apartheid that disadvantage marginalized communities in the Global South, these films give vision to the possibility of liberation through collective action and imagination.
Featuring work by veteran filmmakers like Deepa Dhanraj, Ritwik Ghatak, and Uma Chakravarti, as well as new voices at the cutting edge of Indian political cinema, KRAANTI is a testament to not just the resilience of the communities leading the battles for equity and justice, but also to the grit of documentarians who bear witness to these struggles in the face of censorship, abuse, and violence.
Maysles Documentary Center will also present two live panels with featured filmmakers and activists, moderated by Girish and Datta Choudhury, to further dive into the histories and modalities of resistance mounted against the most powerful by the most vulnerable, as captured by a rich documentary tradition. Please join us as we work to educate, unlearn, and activate the South Asian diaspora and the broader arts community against the entrenched matrices of dispossession and oppression in the subcontinent, rendered exponentially more corrosive by vaccine apartheid.
100% of the proceeds from ticket sales for this program will go toward mutual aid networks that directly serve Dalit Bahujans, Adivasis, migrant workers, funeral workers, sex workers, and other adversely affected communities in South Asia.
The programmers would like to thank the Kolkata People’s Film Festival, Public Service Broadcasting Trust, Arsenal Institute for Film and Video, Moinak Biswas, and Sanghita Sen for their support and assistance.
