Curated by Rajiv Mehrotra

At home, walking (Chalo Sakha Us Des Mein/India)
(114 min; 2019; Hindi with English subtitles)
Director: Rajula Shah

Recipient of the Best Long Documentary, the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala 2021

Screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker

The film inquires deeply into questions of speed, progress and self-liberation through the act of participating in a centuries-old annual pilgrimage alongside millions of people from different castes, class and genders. It makes a quiet yet powerful statement about slowing down, reassessing our needs over wants, and reconnecting with the originary impulse of being human in a world moving towards total mechanization.

 (Collaboration: Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama)

Illustrated lecture by Dr. Charmaine O’Brien who researches and writes about the social and cultural history of food and eating. Internationally recognized for her work on Indian food history and culture, her books include The Penguin Food Guide to India, Recipes from an Urban Village and Flavours of Delhi and a forthcoming book on India’s changing foodways, Routes of Connection: Journeys through India’s contemporary foodscape

Chair: Rajesh Luthra

The talk will draw on Dr. O’Brien’s twenty-five years of experience researching and writing about India’s food and the transformation she witnessed in India’s foodways over that time, exploring how factors such as urbanisation, the changing role of women, globalisation and technology, have affected this change. The key theme of the talk will be the movement of food in India from its preparation and eating ‘inside’ the home to the increasing use of ‘outside’ food: pre-prepared convenience foods and meals, online food delivery, boom in cafes and restaurants, etc.

From Shanties to School: A Silent Movement

By Manimala Roy (Konarak Publishers: 2019)

Discussants: Amb. Reena Pandey, former Ambassador to Armenia; Prof. C.B. Sharma, Professor, School of Education, IGNOU and former Director, NIOS; Prof. Prasannanshu, Professor of English, National Law University, Delhi; and Dr. Manimala Roy, Principal, Basava International School, Delhi and author of the book

Moderator: Dr. Renu Tomar, Assistant Registrar, GGSIPU, Delhi
 

Message in a Bottle: The Lessons of SARS-CoV-2

Speaker: Mr. David Quammen, American author and journalist who has written sixteen books including The Song of the Dodo (1996); The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006), and The Tangled Tree (2018). His 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, described the dynamics of viral spillover from wildlife into humans and predicted a coming pandemic, possibly caused by a coronavirus

Chair: Prof. K. Srinath Reddy, President, Public Health Foundation of India

There are three important questions about SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic: 10 Where did it come from? 2) Where is it going? 3) What does it tell us about the way we humans live – and the way we should live – on this planet. Quammen will address these questions, while placing these virus in its broader historical and scientific context
 

People. Place. Practice

A talk by Compartment S4, a multidisciplinary and collaborative design practice co-founded by 8 partners, with studios based in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Their presentation will highlight participatory and people-centric approaches towards architectural practice -- and how this impacts design thinking across various types and scales of projects.

Followed by a dialogue with Anisha Shekhar Mukherji, Conservation Architect, Author and Visiting Faculty at S.P.A. Delhi. 

The ninth in the bi-monthly series structured around dialogues that endeavour to present the role of architecture in contributing positively to society and to culture. Conceptualised by Anisha Shekhar Mukherji, the series, through interactions with practitioners and scholars, intends to engage with a wide variety of people - professionals and lay-persons alike.  

Registration link
 

Coordinated by Prof. Rajiv Ranjan, Shanghai University, China

Sāma/Syama Jataka in China

Speaker: Prof. Li Ling, Institute of Taoism and Religious Culture, Sichuan University, China

Introduction: Prof. Rajiv Ranjan

Chair: Prof. Y.S. Alone, Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

The story of Sāma/Shyama/Shravan has been known to the Chinese people since about the third century A.D. through the spread of Buddhism. Sāma images appear in China, starting from the far west of China: Xinjiang, where Buddhism first came to China, and heading east to Dunhuang, from the 4th and 5th centuries to the 7th century. The images are very typical and highly recognizable, inheriting a type that has been fixed since Sanchi stupa in the first century B.C. However, around the 7th and 8th centuries, another kind of filial son image appeared in Dunhuang and Sichuan: the image of a son carrying his parents on his shoulders, which was considered to a pagan image and which appeared in the “Spurious scriptures” Bao En Jing. Why is the second type of Sāma considered an image of paganism – the opposite of Buddhism since the eighth century or so?

Registration link
 

Intermezzo (USA) | Click here to watch
(84 min; 1939; b/w; English)
Director: Gregory Ratoff

With Ingrid Bergman, Leslie Howard, Edna Best

Holger Brandt (Leslie Howard), a famous violinist, returns home from a concert tour and meets Anita (Ingrid Bergman), the woman who teaches his daughter Ann Marie (Ann Todd) piano. Attracted by Anita's youth, Holger asks her to be the accompanist on his next tour, and the two embark on an affair, despite Anita's feelings of guilt. Holger reveals his infidelity to his wife, resolving to spend his life with Anita, but the couple is forced to re-examine their relationship when tragedy strikes.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20wtry

(95 min; 2011; Hebrew/Arabic and with English subtitles)
Directors: Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi

Multiple award winner including World Cinema Documentary Directing Award, Sundance 2012; Audience Award and Special Jury Award, Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival 2011; Cinema Eye Honors Award, USA 2013 for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking; Louis Marcorelles Award, Cinéma du Réel 2012; Emmy Award for Documentary, International Emmy Awards 2013; Busan Cinephile Award, Pusan International Film Festival 2012; among others

For the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel, Emad bought a camera to film his family. Soon he found another use for the camera, recording the increasingly chaotic scenes taking place around his house. Emad is a Palestinian farmer and his house is in the village of Bil'in where Israeli settlers, backed by the army, are gradually taking the land.

Emad was already well known in the area for putting himself at risk day after day in order to record the actions of the soldiers, when Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi visited the village to make his documentary Interrupted Streams. Davidi stayed in the village for three months while he was filming and during this time came to know Emad and realised that there was a film to be made from his footage. 

A deeply personal account of life in Palestine.
 

Secrets of the Spanish Armada (UK) Click here to watch
(47 min; 2019; English)
Director: Richard Max

Draining the ocean near Newfoundland reveals a preserved Basque galleon trading in lucrative whale oil. The failed invasion of Tudor England by the Philip II's Great Armada left shipwrecks all over the Northern Atlantic. The Spanish empire relied on powerful ships like this to bring back valuable cargo, like silver and tobacco, from the New World. But when emerging rival England wanted a share of this wealth, the Spanish attacked. Draining an Armada wreck off the coast of Ireland reveals an extraordinary battle for control.

https://vimeo.com/390163240/b237004f93