January 24 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Randeep Maddoke, 70 min, 2018)
The film begins with a poignant question: Do scarecrows have their own land? Director Randeep Maddoke’s Landless is a moving account of Dalit labourers’ struggles in East Punjab for land and a life of dignity. Landless foreshadows insightful concerns about the precariousness of caste solidarity within the Farmers Movement in India today.
Randeep Maddoke in conversation with Shreya Sinha (University of Reading) and Sanjay Kak (Octave Media, Delhi)
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Filmmaker Randeep Maddoke is a Punjab-based concept photographer and documentary filmmaker. He was born and raised in a Dalit landless family of the village Maddoke in the Moga district of Punjab. As an activist, Randeep would travel by bicycle from village to village, organizing meetings on agricultural labour and farmers’ rights. At the age of thirty, and eight years into union activism, he enrolled in the Government College of Arts, Chandigarh and graduated with a specialization in Graphics (Printmaking). Randeep has documented the class struggle of Dalits in Punjab, Haryana, and Tamil Nadu to study the practice and effects of caste. In 2008, he went to Nepal to document the transition of the Nepal monarchy to a democratic Republic. There, too, he located the threads of casteism and the resistance to it. Recently, Randeep led a team of artists to chronicle the farmers’ massive resistance movement against the neoliberal onslaughts of the Indian state, and is currently editing a documentary on the subject. |
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Dr. Shreya Sinha is Lecturer in International Development at the University of Reading. She has done intensive field research on agrarian issues of Punjab, including on farmers, labour, commodity markets and social movements. Her writings are published in journals such as Journal of Agrarian Change, Development and Change and Geoforum and other platforms such as The India Forum, The Conversation and Hindustan Times. She has spoken on the farmers’ protest in various public events and has been interviewed by NDTV India, BBC and Business Insider, among others. Shreya has a PhD in Development Studies from SOAS University of London and has done a postdoc at the University of Cambridge. She is also the Reviews Editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change and curates the journal’s companion website, Agrarian Questions (aqs.org.uk). |
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Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer whose recent work includes the films Red Ant Dream (2013), Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom, 2007), and Words on Water (2002). He has edited the anthology Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir (Penguin India 2011, Haymarket Books USA 2013), and editor of the critically acclaimed photobook, Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers, published independently under the imprint of Yaarbal Books. At Yaarbal he has also edited and published the recent Cups of nun chai by Alana Hunt. A self-taught filmmaker, he writes occasional commentary, and reviews books that he is engaged by. He has been active with the documentary cinema movement in India, and with the Cinema of Resistance project. |