KRAANTI: Visions of Resistance will run 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.
Films Include:
Amar Lenin
Ritwik Ghatak, 1970, 20min
In Bangla with subtitles
A farmer takes in the pomp of Vladimir Lenin’s centenary celebrations in Calcutta in Ritwik Ghatak’s short documentary, which was made in 1970 and then promptly banned. With his customarily bold formal flourishes, Ghatak captures the various forms of the political—marches, song and dance, arts, speeches, idolatry, education, and organizing—and culminates the film in a scene of agrarian uprising that thrums with the promise of revolution.
Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali
Yugantar Film Collective, 1982, 25min
In Marathi with subtitles
As the labor and women’s movements swept through India in the early ’80s, the Yugantar Film Collective spent four months with the women workers at a tobacco factory in Karnataka to document their collective actions for better working conditions. Featuring expressionistic re-enactments, vérité scenes of the workers’ lives, and glimpses into their raucous organizing meetings, Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali is a thrilling time capsule of local resistance and a remarkable work of co-creative filmmaking.
Ek Inquilab Aur Aaya
Uma Chakravarti, 2017, 66min
In Urdu, Hindi, and English with subtitles
Part of the fabled history of Lucknow’s Firangi Mahal, an institution for rationalist Islamic scholarship founded in the late 17th century, a poetess’s rebellion in the 1920s finds echoes in her niece’s defiance of her family, refusal of the purdah, and lifelong commitment to social justice and equity.
Memoirs of Saira and Salim
Eshwarya Grover, 2018, 14min
In Hindi with subtitles
Placid shots of a crumbling, long-abandoned house combine with a pair of voices that narrate the vibrant family life that once filled the space. Slowly, memories of quotidian moments build to the harrowing event that changed everything: the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat. A haunting, hauntological tribute to the things that endure long after everything else has burned away.
Finding Prayers
Nilay Samiran Nandi, 21min
In Bangla with subtitles
Within a world cradled between life and death, a transgender actor plays god while a grainy cellphone video records a gruesome death. As the binaries of good and evil keep blurring, prayers from the margins accumulate in search of an elusive higher power.
Soz: A Ballad of Maladies
Tushar Madhav & Sarvnik Kaur, 2016, 86min
In Hindi, English, and Kashmiri with subtitles
A culture of dissent is ingrained into any art that comes out of Kashmir. Delving beyond hackneyed news cycles, this documentary—three years in the making—speaks to a poet, artists, rock musicians, and a rapper, and uses art and songs to unveil the resistance that usually lies buried under headlines about bullets and bombs.
A Season in My Paradise
Shahzaib Naik & S M Seraj Ali, 2020, 12min
In Hindi with subtitles
What does it feel like to live like Kashmiris? Under a government-sanctioned clampdown, always relearning what it means to be free and to be held captive, cut off from the world that lies beyond? In India’s capital city of Delhi, people struggle to find the vocabulary to imagine this lived reality.
In the Shade of Fallen Chinar
Shawn Sebastian, Fazil NC, 2016, 16min
In English
Amidst clouds of tear gas, pepper sprays, and prolonged lockdowns, a resistance emerges in the world’s most militarized “non-active warzone”—the Kashmir valley. As the local university remains shut, young Kashmiri artists pick up their guitars, pens, and cameras in protest and create art in pursuit of a self-determination denied to them by the Indian government.
The Battle of Bhima Koregaon
Somnath Waghmare, 2017, 49min
In Hindi, Marathi, and English with subtitles.
The history books record the 1818 Battle of Bhima Koregaon as the victory of the British against the region’s local Peshwa rulers. But for the millions of Dalits who gather in the village every year in celebration, the battle represents the victory of the lower-caste Mahars—500 of whom fought on the British side—against their upper-caste oppressors. Melding past and present, interviews and reportage, this documentary delves into the histories, legends, and tensions that still simmer in Bhima Koregaon.
