What the Fields Remember (52 min; 2015; HD; English and with subtitles)

Directed by Subasri Krishnan who will introduce the film

 

Screening will be followed by a discussion

 

On 18th February 1983, from 9 am to 3 pm, more than 2000 Muslims were killed in the town of Nellie and its surrounding villages in Assam. People’s homes were burnt down and their fields destroyed. Most of those who died were old people, women and children. Till date the Nellie massacre remains on the margins of India’s public history, and is virtually wiped out from the nation’s collective memory. The film revisits the massacre three decades later to explore ideas of violence, memory and justice. The film tries to understand how physical spaces that have witnessed the violence continue to mark people’s relationship to history and memory; and attempts to raise larger questions around collective memory – of what we choose to remember and why we choose to forget