The FleaPit Doc Night
Persistence Resistance: A festival of Contemporary Indian Political films
Entry: £5 per evening of films or £8 for both evenings (up to 11 films). Tickets available at The FleaPit on the day.
5pm-10.30pm
Held in New Delhi, India on the 28, 29 and 30 April 2008, Persistence Resistance aimed to create a cinema space to celebrate the diverse nature of films in India and to some extent, the world. The idea was to showcase the range of subjects and forms the films work with, and to interrogate the emerging aesthetics of political filmmaking. It is apparent that in the last decade or so Indian image-makers have crossed new boundaries, carried out different formal experiments and also recast the notion of political filmmaking. Women have played a significant role in this and have given a new formal twist to political documentaries that explore and engage with form and the political terrain in a nuanced manner with spaces for ambiguities and multiple readings. It seems that political films are no longer bound by the binaries of the past, perhaps developed during war filmmaking, and yet there is no one picture emerging, for the formal explorations are as vast as the diverse subjects.
Persistence Resistance screened nearly 100 films over three days in a multitude of spaces and manners.
The FleaPit is proud to present a mini version of Persistence Resistance for documentary lovers and watchers in London. We are attempting to showcase works by some of the pioneering filmmakers of India, many of whom are women, as well as locate some of key challenges and issues facing the nation.
Tuesday July 22, 2008
On this day we explore the concept of the nation-state and locate fractures & margins; spaces & possibilities. In
The Fractured Nation we present three films from two border-states of India: Manipur and Kashmir, that are caught between insurgents and the Indian army. Using remarkably distinct narrative styles and story-telling methods all the three films explore the situation of women in such circumstances. In
Metro-Nation we engage with the metropolis. Both the films in this section are by women directors and are filmed on Bombay. One locates gender and access to toilets in a city while the other looks at the conceptual construct of the metropolis itself: what makes it, who people it and how do issues of migration, moving people, diaspora, labour and identity play out in the same space.
5pm - Introduction
The Fractured Nation
5.15pm -
Waiting... directed by Shabnam Ara and Atul Gupta, 39 mins.
A story of missing people - boys and men who were picked up by security forces and then simply disappeared in Kashmir.
5.55pm -
Tales From the Margins directed by Kavita Joshi, 23 mins.
Twelve women disrobe on the streets of Manipur, in protest… For seven years a young woman has been on a fast-to-death, demanding justice... Why are the women of Manipur using their bodies as their battlefield?
Break
6.30pm -
Autumn's Final Country directed by Sonia Jabbar, 66mins.
The touching story of Indu, Zarina, Shahnaz and Anju, four women who suffer displacement in the conflict-ridden State of Jammu and Kashmir.
Metro-Nation
7.40pm -
Q2P directed by Paromita Vohra 55 mins.
A film about toilets and the city where the toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions – about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.
Break
8.40pm -
7 Islands and a Metro directed by Madhusree Dutta, 100mins.
A tale of Mumbai through a tapestry of fiction, cinema vérité, art objects, found footage, sound installation and literary texts.
www.magiclanternfoundation.org
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