A Minuscule Minority

In Southern India, family disputes are settled by Jamaats—all male bodies which apply Islamic Sharia law to cases without allowing women to be present, even to defend themselves. Recognizing this fundamental inequity, a group of women in 2004 established a women’s Jamaat, which soon became a network of 12,000 members spread over 12 districts. Despite enormous resistance, they have been able to settle more than 8,000 cases to date, ranging from divorce to wife beating to brutal murders and more. Deepa Dhanraj follows several cases, shining a light on how the women’s Jamaat has acquired power through both communal education and the leaders’ persistent, tenacious and compassionate investigation of the crimes. In astonishing scenes we watch the Jamaat meetings, where women often shout over each other about the most difficult facets of their personal lives.

Sultana, a small town prostitute and her pimp Khudabaksh migrate to the metropolis, bringing with them their dreams and meagre belongings. Sultana goes about her bright and artful seductions but somehow misses her targets. Her business collapses. Desperately, Khudabaksh too tries his hand at many jobs but is unsuccessful. Sultana's loneliness and despair get objectified in her desire for a 'salwaar' that she needs to complete her black ensemble for the observance of mourning for Moharram.

Documentary about the nuclear sabre-rattling that has been going on between India and Pakistan. Comprised mostly of interviews with average folks on the street, the movie superbly demonstrates the gulf between the people's will and the greed of those in power.

A new form of observational documentary that borders on science-fiction, John & Jane follows the stories of six Call Agents that answer American 1-800 numbers at a Mumbai call center.

Six directors, six independent films, six visions on the state of the world. Each carrying a unique and personal interpretation of a specific experience, their crossover creates new space for a dynamic and radical inquisitive reflection.

In a far suburb of Bombay, residents from slums are moved into high-rise apartment complexes with the promise of a better life. While these complexes are built allegedly to house the poor, they have been seen as moves to free prime slum land for commercial development. The complexes soon degenerate into places worse than slums. The film lets the viewer experience the living conditions of places hidden away in a 21st century metropolis.

A humorous yet raw and authentic study of women’s reproductive labour across the marriage-market continuum, including, sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy and egg donation, paid domestic work and unpaid domestic/care work across India, while also offering a comparison of the law’s highly differential regulation of these apparently disparate forms of female reproductive labour.

Lovely Villa explores the relationship between architecture, everyday life, family, desire and the idea of ‘home’. Director Rohan Shivkumar grew up in the titular apartment block, located in Borivali —an affluent coastal suburb of Mumbai. The building was designed by Charles Correa to house different communities within one edifice, as an articulation of the ideal environment for the Indian middle classes. Rohan, whose parents lived in the colony for over 40 years, explores its architecture with the aid of found materials, including old photographs and drawings, as well as personal narratives both factual and semi-fictional.

An impressionistic sketch of ‘the public’ as created by our cinema and its relationship with cinema itself.

Who’s Sandra? If you saw her would you know her? Is she naughty or is she nice? And where is she anyway? This film takes a playful look at the figure of “Sandra from Bandra” – part covetous fantasy of the racy Christian girl from Bombay who works as a secretary, wears a dress and likes to dance; part condescending stereotype of a dowdy, religious girl from a minority community. The film searches for Sandra in Bollywood films, in the words of writers and poets, on the gravestones in Bandra’s churchyard. We encounter various claimants to the title – some who aren’t from Bandra and some who aren’t even called Sandra. Finally we find 5 women who really are Sandra from Bandra, each as different from the other as can be even if they are all a little bit the same.

The multilingual Bombay, the Bombay of intolerance, the Bombay of closed textile mills, of popular culture, sprawling slums and real estate onslaughts, the metropolis of numerous ghettos, the El Dorado. This film is a tale of the cities of Bom Bahia / Bombay / Mumbai, through a tapestry of fiction, cinema vérité, art objects, found footage, sound installation and literary texts. It is a chronicle of the journey of a scattered bunch of insignificant fishing hamlets to the coveted stature of a prime metropolis. The narrative is structured around fictional exchanges between Ismat Chugtai and Sadat Hasan Manto, the two legendary writers who lived in this metropolis, over the art of chronicling these multi-layered overlapping cities.

‘Nostalgia for the Future’ is a film on Indian modernity, the making of the citizen and the architecture of the home. It looks at imaginations of homes across four examples of buildings made over the period of a century. These are Lukhshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda – the gigantic home built by a progressive monarch in the late 19th Century; Villa Shodhan in Ahmedabad – a private residence which represents the idea of domesticity within Nehruvian modernity, designed by Le Corbusier; Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, which epitomises the Gandhian aspirations of the nation-state; and public housing in post-independence Delhi, designed by the Government of India to house refugees from Pakistan and the bureaucrats of the newly independent nation.

Kaushik Mukhopadhyay assembles and pairs discarded and broken household gadgets into unexpected cyborg-like creatures that occupy the space between machine, toy and home. His objects are quirky, humorous and noisy which tend to break down sometimes. The Film brings to light these narratives of unexpectedness, embodying fragments of political, personal and art history.

Centred around a film festival of Indian films in China, the Film reflects on the dominant as well as alternative impressions of cultures – people, histories and landscapes – brought to us by cinema, playfully examining the idea of the cinematic image as an integral part of cultural propagation.

A rural artist paints her autobiography, Bollywood movie icons’ images get erased after the weekly run of the film, the national flag flutters on 150 kites, an installation artist paints pop icons on the rolling shutters of the shops, religious icons jostle for attention with Chinese plastic flowers on the vendor’s cart, metaphors of life cycle adorn the mud wall of a home, neighbourhood boys craft the tale of WTC and the sale of toy planes goes up. Symbols of nationalism become a fashionable commodity. Made in India is a film on contemporary visual cultures in India. India, the ever alert and over forgetful, often intolerant, pluri-lingual, pluri-cultural conglomeration of multiple simultaneity.

An Election Diary is a revealing glimpse into the 2019 electoral campaign of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the suburban constituency of Phulpur in Northern India. Blending street interviews, YouTube video clips and recordings of cadre meetings, the film explores BJP's multi-pronged efforts not just in social media outreach, but also in getting people to voting booths on election day. The persona of Narendra Modi, of the BJP, becomes the hook throughout the campaign, side-lining even the party's local candidate. Infrastructural issues plaguing the constituency are deflected with appeals to India's glowing international image and dissolved in a cult of personality. Avijit Mukul Kishore's film, in contrast, is resolutely local. With dispassionate curiosity, it documents the mechanics of a cog in what is called 'India's Greatest Election Machine'.