PERIPHERIES OF THE REAL

The festival presents films that looks closely at artful and critical engagements in video and moving images by Indian contemporary artists. Organised in collaboration with Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists (VAICA), the festival is curated by Bharati Kapadia, Chandita Mukherjee and Anuj Daga, the festival is focuses on three themes – The Cartographies of Sensation; Peripheries of the Real; and Urban Heterotopias

Aditi Kulkarni & Payal Arya Memory is Always in the Periphery 09.24
Aditi Kulkarni and Payal Arya look at personal isolation, infused with new meaning during the pandemic. Using 3D scanning technologies, they treat spaces and memories so as to create insightful perceptions. 

Abeer Khan Child-lock 02.12
Produced during the lockdown period, this video plays with the notion of freedom of mind. The afternoons of the lockdown reminded Abeer of her childhood summers, of daydreaming during humid afternoons on fantasy scenarios and projecting these onto the walls.

Maya Krishna Rao It's Easier Now 02.45
Theatre artist Maya Krishna Rao explores lockdown and confinement with designer Mansi Thapliyal. 

Saba Hasan Death will Come like a Shadow 02.11
Saba Hasan responds to the social isolation caused by the pandemic by turning the camera on her own self. A solitary experience of the passage of time, created with painterly textures and overlapping images, sounds and plays of light, and the artist’s voice, reciting her own poem.

Hetal Chudasama Deepest Demarcation 09.52
A performance by Hetal Chudasama reflecting on the death, loss and trauma following the lockdown. 

C Chaithanya The Final Flutter 01.35
Through hand gestures and reflected images, Chaithanya draws a parallel between a butterfly’s existence and that of medical professionals like herself during the pandemic, seeing the emotions and helplessness inside a Covid ward.

Archana Hande Indefinite 05.29
Archana Hande says her video diary is about many layers, “an indefinite diary of time, anxiety and uncertainty of space.” Revisiting recent memories, she feels as though we are closing a period of enforced rest. Now there is an urgency to live in the present and to practice again. 

Kunatharaju Mrudula Try.... Try.... Try.... 02.30
Women’s hands wave and knock urgently on the glass panels separating us from the subjects in this video. The repeated signalling of the hands fills us with dread, and reminded of the threat of domestic or societal violence that women live with constantly.

Khandakar Ohida The Last Dream I Saw 03.35
Khandakar Ohida’s work is marked by her concern for women, especially women who cannot easily communicate their thoughts.

Khandakar Ohida I was Still Silent 03.22
Poised on the fine line between the spoken and the unspoken, the work depicts the invisible labour of the household juxtaposed with the burden of familial duties and concerns. 

Kunatharaju Mrudula Stain 03.05
The white space of a fresh bedsheet forms a staging space for this video. It starts with a play of tangible tension behind the stage, with shifting, gripping unseen forms crushing a pomegranate. 

Bharati Kapadia For Sahba 05.14
Sometimes catching up with an old friend can be about discovering more than you could have imagined. Bharati Kapadia’s phone call to her friend Sahba brings to us the story of an enduring friendship between two women that is reaffirmed even as they speak.

Manmeet Devgun And we Became One 02:07
This work talks about relationships and experiences of love and betrayal. 

Shreya Menon Rabbit Hole 01.41
This work by Shreya Menon is an attempt to represent how power dynamics pressurise people and compel them to adopt ways of living that may be alien to them. 

Ranbir Kaleka House of Opaque Water 10.36
The islands of the Sundarbans are coming under ever-rising sea levels. Ranbir Kaleka travels with a farmer Sheikh Lal Mohan, to a spot in the sea, under which his submerged village lies. 

Devadeep Gupta Normalisation of a Disaster 09.05
Devadeep Gupta observes the impact of a massive industrial disaster, the Baghjan oil and natural gas blowout of 2020. In this stark video, apart from local residents and frontline workers, we see the disaster tourists. 

Pranay Datta Moments Before the Fall 06.33
Pranay Datta simulates ecological conditions and explores a natural phenomenon through the lens and the brain of a machine in this work. 
 

THE CARTOGRAPHIES OF SENSATION

The festival presents films that looks closely at artful and critical engagements in video and moving images by Indian contemporary artists. Organised in collaboration with Video Art by Indian Contemporary Artists (VAICA), the festival is curated by Bharati Kapadia, Chandita Mukherjee and Anuj Daga; Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum; and Comet Media Foundation, the festival is focuses on three themes – The Cartographies of Sensation; Peripheries of the Real; and Urban Heterotopias

Ayisha Abraham I saw a God dance 06.48
“The celebrated dancer Ram Gopal first came to me as an apparition from strips of 8 mm film that I found in a plastic bag outside an old house” says Ayisha Abraham of her work

Bharati Kapadia Playing with Danger 02.12
Danger has many faces, says Bharati Kapadia in this brief video. 

Sumakshi Singh Mapping the Memory Mandala 06.52
In Sumakshi Singh’s installations, environments are transformed into illusions, through time-lapse animations. Her works explore the bases of how we assign attention, construct meaning and perceive our realities within and without. 

Gigi Scaria Prisms of Perception 04.20
Gigi Scaria asserts that while claiming to live in contemporary times, we actually live deep inside in our own subjective worlds, seeing social ‘change’ only from our limited angles of view. 

Tallur L N Interference 04.00 
Tallur L N captures the dusting of an old carpet by hand in slow-motion. The work alludes to the sediment of time and the release of dust embedded under the surface of our dominant narratives, gives room for thought.

Sukanya Ghosh Isosceles Forest 03.00
Sukanya Ghosh creates an optical collage in this work. She says that “the overlapping and intermingling of images fading in and out of each other, seem to look for new propositions, following segmented routes as if seeking out the best possible path to freedom.”

Sohrab Hura The Lost Head & The Bird 10.12
Sohrab Hura takes us to a disorienting and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction are blurred. in this frightening fast-changing, post-truth world, actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

Manjot Kaur Constant motion 07.40
This work of Manjot Kaur is conceived as an intervention between the microbial, biological, ecological and banal aspects of motion. Time and growth are the central ideas here.

Ashok Meena Opium 05.08
Set in a temple town, when large numbers of pilgrims have come to celebrate a festival, Ashok Meena takes us through the play of a riveting range of emotions.

Sanskriti Chattopadhyay Becoming Invisible 11.54
Sanskriti Chattopadhyay draws attention to the issue of the virtual footprints that we all leave behind on the internet. 

Vishal Kumaraswamy Swaayattate (Autonomy) 16.13
Vishal Kumaraswamy investigates the complex entanglements of the organic and synthetic worlds in this work drawing from critical reflections on surveillance and racist capitalism, and ethical concerns related to the adoption of Artificial Intelligence.

Kathak Lok: Temple, Tradition and History

By Shovana Narayan and Geetika Kalha (Vitasta Publishing Pvt. Ltd.: 2022)

Discussants: Shri Pavan K. Varma, writer and former Ambassador to Bhutan and Cyprus; Dr. B.N. Goswamy, well-known art historian for former Vice Chairman, Sarabhai Foundation, Ahmedabad; Shri Ashok Vajpeyi, poet and former Chairman, Lalit Kala Akademi; Dr. Shovana Narayan, Kathak Guru and Choreographer, co-author of the book; and Ms Geetika Kalha, writer, consultant and co-author of the book

The dance will include a short Kathak performance by Pt. Ayodhya Sharan Mishra and Pt. Satyaprakash Pracheta Mishra 
 

Tribes of India: Realities and Representations

Edited by Ruby Bhardwaj and Charu Kala (Vitasta Publishing Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi: 2022)

Discussants: Prof. Nandini Sundar, Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi; Prof. Swati Pal, Principal, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi; Dr. Veio Pou, Associate Professor, Dept. of English, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi; Dr. Ruby Bhardwaj, Associate Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi and Co-Editor of the book; Dr. Charu Kala, Associate Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi

Chair: Prof. Anvita Abbi, linguist and scholar

(113 min; 2019; Malawi/English and with subtitles)
Written, Directed by and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor

Recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, Sundance Film Festival 2019; Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture, Image Awards (NAACP) 2020; and Fiction Grand Award, International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights 2019

Based on the memoir of the same name by Malawian innovator William Kamkwamba (co-written by journalist Bryan Mealer), The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells the remarkable story of how, as a largely self-taught techno-wizard, William (played by Maxwell Simba) saved his village from famine by building a wind turbine from scrap metal and bike parts

Lost Worlds: The Search for Troy (UK) | Click here to watch
(49 min; 2002; English)
Director: Nigel Maslin

For centuries archaeologists have tried to find the legendary city of Troy but without success. Troy is famous as the scene of the Trojan War, the fight for the world’s most beautiful woman, Helen and the ruse that won her back, the Trojan Horse.

It is a story that has been told and retold by poets and actors for thousands of years but is it real? Did the city of Troy actually exist? A century ago a pioneer archaeologist claimed he had found the site of Troy, but while the public was satisfied the experts were not. Now a team of archaeologists has returned to the same site in a dig that spans the past 15 years, they have made discoveries which are both dramatic and controversial but at the heart of their work one question persists have they found the lost world of Troy?

https://documentaryheaven.com/search-for-troy/
 

Series director: Adrian Pennink
Recipient of the International Emmy 2008 for Best Documentary 

A six-part documentary presented by Niall Ferguson. Based on his book The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World, the film examines the long history of money, credit, and banking. Throughout the series, Niall Ferguson examines the origins of the pillars of the world’s financial systems, and how behind every great historical phenomenon – empires and republics, wars and revolutions – there lies a financial secret.

Episode 2: Human Bondage (47 min)
How did finance become the realm of the masters of the universe? Through the rise of the bond market in Renaissance Italy. With the advent of bonds, war finance was transformed and spread to north-west Europe and across the Atlantic. It was the bond market that made the Rothschilds the richest and most powerful family of the 19th century.

(81 min; 2004; English)
Director: Jessica Yu

Recipient of the Best Documentary Feature Award, Ojai Film Festival 2004; and Best Documentary Feature Award, Vancouver International Film Festival 2004

In The Realms Of The Unreal is an intriguing portrait of the double-life of outsider artist Henry Darger. By day Darger worked as a hospital janitor, and by night he toiled away in his Chicago apartment on his fantastical paintings and writings, which were only discovered upon his death in 1983. With actors reading from Darger's literary texts, alongside animated sequences of his artwork, Jessica Yu's documentary immerses us in the world of a reclusive individual's bizarre imagination.

Last Train Home (Gui tu lie che/China) | Click here to watch
(90 min; 2009; Chinese with English subtitles)
Director: Lixin Fan

Multiple award winner including Cinema Eye Honors Awards for Outstanding Achievemnt in Production; Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography; & Outstanding Achievement in an International Feature Film, Cinema Eye Honors Awards, USA 2011; Best Feature-Length Documentary Award, Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival 2009; Asia Pacific Screen Awards 2010 for Best Documentary Feature Film; among others

A deeply moving look at an unavoidably fractured family, Lixin Fan’s documentary follows a clan of Chinese migrant workers separated by economic circumstance. The heart of the film is the shaky relationship between the sweatshop-employed parents and their defiant teenage daughter, who ekes out a meagre big city existence.

https://archive.org/details/xtm-lth

(120 min; 2006; English)
Director: Ric Burns

Eugene O'Neill tells the haunting story of the life and work of America's greatest and only Nobel Prize-winning playwright - set within the context of the harrowing family dramas and personal upheavals that shaped him, and that he in turn struggled all his life to give form to in his art. More than a biography of the greatest literary genius the American theatre has produced, this American Experience production is a moving meditation on loss and redemption, family and memory, the cost of being an artist, and the inescapability of the past. It is also a penetrating exploration of the masterpieces O'Neill created only at the very end of his career - The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night.