Dear Friends,
We are pleased to invite you to a three day screening of our films by the Bangalore Film Society on June 4, 5 and 6, 2010 at 6.30pm, Venue: Ashirvad, 30, St. Marks Road, Opposite State Bank of India, Bangalore. Please see the schedules and the synopses of the films below. There will be a Q&A with the filmmakers, after the screening.
Warmly,
Anjali and Jayasankar
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Venue: Ashirvad, St. Marks Road
Contact: 25493705/9886213516
Friday 4th June, 2010
6.30- Irani Cafe Instructions, 2008 (3 Mins)
6.35- Breasts, 2006 (10 Mins)
6.45- Agreement, 2006 (10 Mins)
7.00- Do Din Ka Mela, 2009 (60 Mins)
Saturday 5th June, 2010
6.30- Our Family, 2007 (56 Mins)
7.40- YCP 1997, 1997 (43 Mins)
Sunday 6th June, 2010
6.30- Memory.Space, 2006 (2 Mins)
6.32 - A Short Film on Rain, 2009 (2 Mins)
6.35- Naata, 2003 (45 Mins)
7.30- Saacha, 2001(49 mIns
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Synopses
Irani Restaurant Instructions
4 mins., 2008
http://iranimumbai.blogspot.com/
Based on an eponymous poem by Nissim Ezekiel, the film explores the space and time of an Irani Restaurant in Mumbai. These are inexpensive, inclusive spaces, which are being transformed in to up
market Cafes and fast food joints...
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Songs of Resistance : Breasts
10 mins, 2006
Songs of Resistance is a series that weaves together the narratives and work of four Tamil women poets.. Salma negotiates subversive expression within the tightly circumscribed space allotted to a woman in a small town. For Kuttirevathi, solitude is a crucial creative space from where her work resonates. Her anthology entitled Breasts (2003) became a controversial work that elicited hate mail, obscene calls and threats. This has been resisted by a group of poets and other artists who have formed an organization called Anangu (Woman).
Festivals
Special Mention, Sadho Poetry Festival, Delhi 2008
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Songs of Resistance : Agreement
10 mins, 2006
Songs of Resistance is a series that weaves together the narratives and work of four Tamil women poets. Salma negotiates subversive expression within the tightly circumscribed space allotted to a woman in a small town. Her work became a controversial work that elicited hate mail, obscene calls and threats. This has been resisted by a group of poets and other artists who have formed an organization called Anangu (Woman).
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Do Din Ka Mela
60 mins, 2009
2009, Kutchi and Gujarati with English subtitles, 60 mins.
Camera: KP Jayasankar; Location Sound: Harikumar M.; Script, Editing &
Sound Design: Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar
http://atwodayfair.wordpress.com/
“Nothing in the world will last – it is but a two day fair” sings Mura Lala Fafal, drawing inspiration from the Sufi traditions of Sant Kabir and Abdul Lateef Bhita’i. He is accompanied on the Jodiya Pava (double flute) by his nephew Kanji Rana Sanjot. Kanji taught himself to play and make his own flutes after hearing the music on the radio. Mura and Kanji are Meghwals, a pastoral Dalit community that lives on the edge of the Great Rann of Kutch, in the Western Indian state of Gujarat. They are both daily wage labourers and subsistence farmers in an arid zone. The film is a two day journey into the music and every day life of this uncle-nephew duo, set against the backdrop of the Rann. The Great Rann of Kutch is a vast salt marsh/desert that separates India and Pakistan. Before the Partition the Meghwals moved freely across the Rann, between Sindh (now in Pakistan) and Kutch. The music and culture of the region is a rich tapestry of many traditions and faiths, an affirmation of the syncretic wisdom of the marginalized comunities that live in this spectacular and yet fragile area.
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Our Family
56 mins , 2007 Tamil with English subtitles
Directed by Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar
http://ourfamily2007.wordpress.com/
What does it mean to cross that line which sharply divides us on the basis of gender? To free oneself of the socially constructed onus of being male? Is there life beyond a hetero-normative family? Set in Tamilnadu, ‘Our Family’ brings together excerpts from Nirvanam, a one person performance, by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and a family of three generations of trans-gendered female subjects, Asha, Seetha and Dhana, who are bound together by ties of adoption. They all belong to the trans-gendered community called Aravanis (aka Hijras, in some parts of India). Asha Bharathi, the grandmother, is the president of the Tamilnadu Aravanigal Association, Chennai. Seetha, the daughter and Dhana, the granddaughter live in Coimbatore. Weaving together performance, life histories and everyday life, the film problematises the divides between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Awards
Special Jury Award in the Documentary Section, Signs 2007, Thiruvananthapuram
Certificate of Merit and Special Mention, Mumbai International Film
Festival 2008
Indian Documentary Producers Association ( IDPA) Gold for Best Script, 2008
IDPA Gold for Best Sound Design, 2008
IDPA Silver for Best Editing, 2008
IDPA Certificate of Merit for the Best Documentary, 2008
Telecast: NDTV 24x7
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YCP 1997
43 mins, 1997
Built between 1865 and 1876, Yerwada Central Prison (YCP), Pune, is one of the oldest prisons in India, with over 2500 inmates. In this video, six poets and artistes of the YCP share their work, their lives... Through their poems and musings, the film explores the modes in which they creatively cope with the pain and stigma of incarceration, in the process questioning their selfhood and the socially constructed divides between ‘us' and ‘them', between the ‘normal' and the ‘deviant'.
Awards
Certificate of Merit, Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) 1998
Jury’s Award for Best Innovation at the Astra Festival of
Anthropological Documentary Film, Sibiu, Romania, 1998.
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Memory.Space
90 secs, 2006
An exploration of the inner self, shot through with shards of memory, fragile, as the outside world leaks in. It seeks a fleeting moment of transcendence, beyond polarities (inner/outer, self/world), a transitory space of being and nothingness.
Indian Documentary Producers Association Awards 2007
Gold for the Best Cell Story
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A Short Film on Rain
1 min 26 secs, 2009
Clouds, Rain, People, Umbrellas, Sea, Flood, Ebb and a dream called Mumbai
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Naata (The Bond)
45 mins, 2003
Directed by K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro, Camera: KP
Jayasankar; Location Sound: Harikumar M.; Script, Editing & Sound
Design: Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar
http://naata.wordpress.com/
Friends and activists, Bhau Korde and Waqar Khan, work with neighborhood peace committees in Dharavi, Mumbai to promote conflict resolution through the collective production and use of visual media. Korde and Khan are both long-time residents of Dharavi and both first-generation migrants to the city. As Asia's largest slum, with a population of 800,000, Dharavi has often been represented as a breeding ground for filth, vice and poverty, full of immigrants whose right to live in the city is often questioned by vigilante citizens' groups and right-wing politicians. However, Dharavi's long history of immigration has created a creative, productive space which plays an important role in the economy of the city; it is one of the major hubs of the informal sector that produces commodities ranging from food products to leather goods catering to a large export market. When the deadly riots of 1992-93 tore the city and their community apart, Korde and Khan were moved to act, working to change both the negative perception of Dharavi and erase religious and ethnic divisions. Naata follows these remarkable men as they work on their film, Ekta Sandesh - their work paralleling that of Naata's own filmmakers, another filmmaking pair who are immigrants to their city of Bombay. Traveling with a projector and a screen, Korde and Khan show the film at their own expense in communities savaged by distrust and prejudice. The two pairs of filmmakers join forces in this documentary to spread their important message even further. Naata is the second in a series on the people and the city of Mumbai. It is a sequel to Saacha (The Loom), 2001
Telecast: YLE Finnish Television Network, Finland, NDTV 24/7
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Saacha (The Loom)
49 mins, 2001
http://saacha.wordpress.com/
Saacha is about a poet, a painter and a city. The poet is Narayan Surve, and the painter Sudhir Patwardhan. The city is the city of Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both the protagonists have been a part of the left cultural movement in the city. Weaving together poetry and paintings with accounts of the artists and memories of the city, the film explores the modes and politics of representation, the relevance of art in the contemporary social milieu, the decline of the urban working class in an age of structural adjustment, the dilemmas of the left and the trade union movement and the changing face of a huge metropolis.
Awards
Second Prize, New Delhi Video Forum, 2001
