November 29 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Nirmal Chander, 60 min, 2019)
For over five decades, 83-year-old Vidyadutt Sharma has nurtured Moti Bagh, his 5 acre farm in a small Himalayan village. Around him are 7000 ghost villages — a chilling testimony to large-scale migration by locals in search of employment. Chronicling the changing landscape in verses of resistance, Vidyadutt Sharma along with Ram Singh, his Nepali farmhand plough the fields and keep them alive, hoping to return Moti Bagh to its old glory…
Nirmal Chander in conversation with Nilita Vachani (NYU)
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Nirmal Chander is a filmmaker who has been working in the field of documentaries for over two decades. His films have received awards at several national and international festivals and have been telecast on NDTV and on Doordarshan in India. His award-winning documentaries include All the World's a Stage (2008) about the performance troupe the Sidi Goma; Dreaming Taj Mahal (2010), about a Pakistani taxi driver who dreams of visiting India; The Face Behind the Mask (2014) on the life of a Seraikella Chhau dancer, Shashadhar Acharya and Zikr us Parivash ka (In Praise of That Angel Face, 2015) on the legendary ghazal singer, Begum Akhtar. Moti Bagh was joint winner at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival, Kerala and India's Entry to the Oscars for 2019. Chander also conducts workshops on documentary filmmaking and has served on juries at film festivals. |
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Nilita Vachani is a documentary filmmaker and editor, and a writer and teaches at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University and the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. She has produced, directed, researched and edited the critically acclaimed, award-winning films Eyes of Stone about the ritual of spirit possession and healing among women in rural India; Diamonds in a Vegetable Market about itinerant sellers and performers on India's long-distance roadways; When Mother Comes Home for Christmas which follows the story of a Sri Lankan nanny working in Europe whose own children grow up in orphanages. Vachani's novel HomeSpun won Foreword's Choice Fiction Award in 2008. Her long-form investigative writing on domestic work and white collar crime was published in CARAVAN and won the Asia Media Foundation's Inaugural prize for Investigative Journalism in 2016. She is presently working on a book on filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. |
The film will be available for viewing from 2.00 PM CET/ 6.30 PM IST on Friday, the 26th of November until 2.00 PM CET/ 6.30 PM IST on Tuesday, the 30th of November.