November 22 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Renjith Kuzhur, 77 min, 2015)
18 Feet symbolizes the prescribed ‘holy’ distance that Dalit communities had to keep from the upper castes in order to ensure their purity. The film focuses on the indigenous Kerala folk song band Karinthalakkoottam, a collective of Dalit performers who have chosen to embrace and celebrate their identity rather than hide it, and through their music, showcase their community to the world.
Renjith Kuzhur in conversation with Dickens Leonard (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) and Gajendran Ayyathurai (CeMIS, Göttingen)
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Renjith Kuzhur made his debut as director with his film 18 feet. For this film he has won Kerala State Award for best director (documentary) in 2015 and best editor award at the Mumbai International Film Festival 2016. He graduated from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Kolkata, specializing in Film editing. His achievements as an editor include Rong'kuchak which won the best film award at the National Students Film festival in the year 2014 and ‘Kapila’, which won the national award in 2015. His work has been screened among other venues, at Munich Film festival, International Student Video and Film Festival Beijing, International Film Festival of India, Mumbai International film Festival, Visions du reel, Switzerland and International Short and Documentary Film Festival of Kerala. |
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Dickens Leonard is an Assistant Professor in Literature at the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Delhi, India (from Oct 2021). He also worked at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (2020-2021) and the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad (2017-2020), India. He researched on the writings of the nineteenth century Tamil intellectual Iyothee Thass and Tamil Buddhism at UoH for PhD (2017). Recently, he received the Fulbright post-doc grant (2020) to work on the project titled Ethical Dimension of Caste-less Community in the US for 2-years. He was, formerly, a DAAD visiting-PhD fellow (2016) at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Georg-August University, Goettingen, Germany. He has published on anti-caste thought and Tamil films in renowned journals and edited volumes. |
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Gajendran Ayyathurai is an anthropologist and a historian based in Göttingen, Germany. He has published on the culture, memory, and history of the casteless Tamils/Indians in Tamil, English, and German. His current book project is titled Deep Resistance: Buddhism, Caste, and the Marginalized in Colonial India. He has initiated a new subfield, Critical Caste Studies, with scholars from India, Europe, and North America. |