February 4, 10.00 - 13.00 (CET)/14.30 - 17.30 PM (IST)

In 2019, ICAS:MP commissioned a series of photo essays and video diaries on the Indian general elections scheduled to take place that summer. Elections are routinely celebrated as proof of democracy’s triumphant and astonishing endurance in India, and billed as the “biggest and most complex electoral exercise” in the “world’s largest democracy.” Our aim was to go beyond the hype: to visually document election campaigns across different Indian states and capture some of the rhythms and rituals, sounds and sights of electoral democracy in action. An additional and central focus of the visual diaries project was to look at the use of media (print, TV, audio-visual and social media) across electoral campaigns, and their deployment by the different political parties.

Researchers had an open-ended brief to choose any campaign in any state that they were familiar with, and follow the candidate over an extended period on the campaign trail. Five photo essays and six videos resulted, that covered campaigns across the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. From the choices made by the individual researchers, a fascinating pattern emerged of campaigns that exemplified the electoral journeys of various kinds of political outsiders: those who represented marginalized identities (gender, caste, tribe) and brand-new or minority political parties; those whose electoral fates were insecure and tenuous. In an election dominated by the financial and political might of the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of prime minister Narendra Modi, many researchers chose to focus on opposition campaigns. Their portraits of Indian elections had a specifically embattled edge and intensity, as a contest not just over the choice of parliamentary representatives, but the future of democracy itself.

Three years later, the visual diaries of Indian elections are ready for public presentation and reflection. The long gap between their production in 2019 and public exhibition in 2022 brings a whole new layer and meaning to their value as documents of democracy. Instead of current events snapshots, these are now retrospective reflections on the lineages of our troubled present. They track the crooked line that connects the norm of democratic elections to the supposed exception of authoritarian populism and Hindu supremacist politics. Instead of a celebration of India’s “festival of democracy,” they offer a more ambivalent and more pessimistic appraisal of electoral democracy’s limits and shadows.

Diarists

Michael Collins
Michael Collins is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Researcher who teaches at the University of Göttingen.

Karthikeyan Damodaran
Karthikeyan Damodaran is a researcher and teaches at CeMIS at the University of Göttingen.

Sarthak Bagchi
Sarthak Bagchi is an Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University. He teaches courses on Democracy, Indian Political Processes and India's democratic transformation.

Rajan Pandey
Rajan Pandey is a freelance journalist associated with the survey agency People’s Pulse.

Avijit Mukul Kishore
Avijit Mukul Kishore is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Mumbai. He works primarily in documentary and inter-disciplinary moving-image practice.

Subasri Krishnan
Subasri Krishnan is a filmmaker, and heads the Media Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlement (IIHS) in Bengaluru.

Lalit Vachani
Lalit Vachani is a filmmaker and researcher and teaches at CeMIS at the University of Göttingen.

Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee
Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee are documentary filmmakers and activists based in Kolkata, founder members of the People's Film Collective and co-organisers of the Kolkata People's Film Festival.

Nakul Sawhney is a documentary filmmaker and founder of Chalchitra Abhiyan, a media collective that trains local people from marginalised communities in video technology.

Neha Dixit is an award-winning freelance Indian journalist covering politics, gender and social justice and is visiting faculty at Ashoka University.

Discussants

Ruchir Joshi
Ruchir Joshi is a film-maker and writer based in Calcutta.

Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay teaches history and political economy at IISER Mohali, India. Currently, he is a guest professor at CeMIS.

Srirupa Roy
Srirupa Roy is professor and Chair of State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen.

The Visual Diaries project was commissioned and supported by ICAS:MP, an initiative of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research, Germany.

Due to a technical issue the link was not visible in the last E-Mail. This is the updated version.

February 3 14:00-16:00 CET/18:30-20:30 IST
(Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu, 2021, 70 min)

How did Hindu nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all
these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family
history, 'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits the
workings of frontal organizations in the RSS network responsible for the
recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two
consecutive elections trails, from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, ⁣
one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of
hope.

Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu in conversation with Dwaipayan
Bhattacharyya (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) and Shuddhabrata
Sengupta (Artist and Writer, Raqs Media Collective, Delhi)

	Dwaipayan Banerjee is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, researcher and based in Kolkata. He is an alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University, and presently researching on labour movement as a doctoral student at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Kasturi and Dwaipayan are co-founder-members of several independent, volunteer-led collectives; namely, the People’s Film Collective, Humans of Patuli etc. Both of them have been active organizers of the 'No Vote to BJP' campaign as co-conveners of the citizens' platform, Bengal Against Fascist RSS-BJP. They had co-edited the book, 'Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India' (2018). Recently they have finished a feature-length film on the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in Bengal, titled 'A Bid for Bengal' (2021).
	Kasturi Basu is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer, and editor based in Kolkata. By training, she is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey. Her debut feature-length documentary, 'S.D. : Saroj Dutta and His Times' won the 12th John Abraham award for the Best Documentary at the SiGNS Film Festival, Kerala, in 2018, and got screened at several prestigious national and international festivals. She is a founder-member of a community radio station, ‘Radio Quarantine Kolkata'.
	Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya teaches Indian politics, issues of democracy and development, and methods in social sciences at the Centre for Political Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has written on the Indian Left, politics in contemporary West Bengal, local democracy, electoral politics, and social policies. His work seeks to generate explanatory frameworks for political processes based on extensive field-studies. He has earlier been a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and held visiting positions at various universities abroad. He has co-edited a book on social capital and his book Government as Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of governance from below in India’s multi-layered democracy seen through the prism of West Bengal’s long Left Front rule. He is member of the M. S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advance Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP).
	Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective and is an occasional writer and commentator on social and political questions in India.

February 3 14:00-16:00 CET/18:30-20:30 IST
(Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu, 2021, 70 min)

How did Hindu nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all
these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family
history, 'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits the
workings of frontal organizations in the RSS network responsible for the
recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two
consecutive elections trails, from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, ⁣
one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of
hope.

Dwaipayan Banerjee and Kasturi Basu in conversation with Dwaipayan
Bhattacharyya (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) and Shuddhabrata
Sengupta (Artist and Writer, Raqs Media Collective, Delhi)

	Dwaipayan Banerjee is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, researcher and based in Kolkata. He is an alumnus of Presidency College and Calcutta University, and presently researching on labour movement as a doctoral student at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Kasturi and Dwaipayan are co-founder-members of several independent, volunteer-led collectives; namely, the People’s Film Collective, Humans of Patuli etc. Both of them have been active organizers of the 'No Vote to BJP' campaign as co-conveners of the citizens' platform, Bengal Against Fascist RSS-BJP. They had co-edited the book, 'Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India' (2018). Recently they have finished a feature-length film on the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in Bengal, titled 'A Bid for Bengal' (2021).
	Kasturi Basu is an independent documentary filmmaker, activist, writer, and editor based in Kolkata. By training, she is a physicist, an alumnus of Jadavpur University, University of Cambridge, and Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey. Her debut feature-length documentary, 'S.D. : Saroj Dutta and His Times' won the 12th John Abraham award for the Best Documentary at the SiGNS Film Festival, Kerala, in 2018, and got screened at several prestigious national and international festivals. She is a founder-member of a community radio station, ‘Radio Quarantine Kolkata'.
	Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya teaches Indian politics, issues of democracy and development, and methods in social sciences at the Centre for Political Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has written on the Indian Left, politics in contemporary West Bengal, local democracy, electoral politics, and social policies. His work seeks to generate explanatory frameworks for political processes based on extensive field-studies. He has earlier been a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and held visiting positions at various universities abroad. He has co-edited a book on social capital and his book Government as Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of governance from below in India’s multi-layered democracy seen through the prism of West Bengal’s long Left Front rule. He is member of the M. S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advance Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP).
	Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist and curator with the Raqs Media Collective and is an occasional writer and commentator on social and political questions in India.

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)

	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.
	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).
	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.

On January 17th 2016 a Dalit, Phd research scholar, and activist Rohith Vemula unable to bear the persecution from a partisan administration and dominant caste Hindu supremacists hung himself at Hyderabad Central University. His suicide note, which argued against the “value of a man being reduced to his immediate identity” galvanized student politics in India. The film attempts to track this historic movement that is changing the conversation on caste in India.

Deepa Dhanraj will be in conversation with K.Satyanarayana (EFLU, Hyderabad) and Surabhi Sharma (NYU, Abu Dhabi). The discussion will be moderated by Rupa Viswanath (CeMIS).

	Deepa Dhanraj is a researcher, writer and an independent documentary filmmaker. Her documentaries and writing that span a period of forty years engage with questions related to women's status, political participation and resistance. She was one of the founding members of Yugantar, a feminist film collective that made a set of films on the political organizing of women domestic workers and women tobacco factory workers. Films on domestic violence and the ecological Chipko movement, led by rural women to protect trees and the environment in the foothills of the Himalayas followed. Law as a site of enquiry has been an enduring theme, whether it is films that interrogate customary law and the strategies that tribal and Muslim women use to counter patriarchal verdicts, or examining how a human rights legal practice began against the suppression of dissent and extrajudicial killings of activists. The caste question and the myriad forms of discriminations that Dalits experience and the rise of Dalit assertion is another theme that she explores in many films. Her films have been screened widely and awarded at several prominent national and international documentary film festivals.
	K. Satyanarayana is a professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad, India. He co-edited two volumes of new Dalit writing: No Alphabet in Sight (2011), Steel Nibs Are Sprouting (2013) and, most recently, Dalit Studies (2016) and Dalit Text (2020). His research interests are in the fields of Dalit studies, literary history, and cultural theory. He is a regular commentator on Dalit issues in the media and public forums.
	Surabhi has been an independent filmmaker making feature-length documentaries and short films since 2000. Her documentaries, fiction, and video installations engage with cities in transition using the lens of labor, music, and migration. Her works have been screened at International Film Festivals like Dubai International Film Festival, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, MAMI Mumbai Film Festival amongst others. She has also created video installations that have been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London; nGbK, Berlin, Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016). Her films have been recognized and awarded at the 8th Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Brisbane 2016; Eco-Cinema, Greece 2003 (The Ramsar-Medwet Award), Film South Asia, Kathmandu 2001; Karachi Film Festival 2002; and The Festival of Three Continents, Buenos Aires 2002. Surabhi is currently teaching and the Program Head , Film and New Media at the New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE.

The 11^th screening & discussion event of Crossings – the CeMIS film festival will take place online on Monday, December 20^th 2021 at 4.00 PM CET/ 8.30 PM IST.
We are pleased to present three award-winning films under the section Short Takes, featuring the documentary short film form.

Prateek Shekhar, Eshwarya Grover and Payal Kapadia will be in conversation with Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar.

The films will be available for viewing from 2.00 PM CET/ 6.30 PM IST on Friday, the 17^thof December until 2.00 PM CET/ 6.30 PM IST on Tuesday, the 21^stof December. Please find the links below.

Chai Darbari

20 December 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Prateek Shekhar, 29 min, 2018)

The film is set in the city of Ayodhya, twenty seven years after the demolition of the mosque and foreshadows the building of the Ram Temple. Set at a tea-stall where people assemble to gossip and to discuss politics, the filmmaker stumbles upon varied textures of conversations. Conversations carrying echoes from print, electronic, social media; redolent with the local atmosphere and the context of the city's past.

After completing his Bachelors in Sociology from Delhi University, Prateek Shekhar went on to do his Masters in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai. There, he worked on two documentaries, Not Caste in Stone (2014) and Govandi, Crime aur Camera (2015). Prateek has assisted filmmaker and video artist Amar Kanwar. Chai Darbari (2019) emerged from the six-month filmmaking programme ‘Moving Image: Open Form’ at SACAC, New Delhi.

And What Is the Summer Saying

20 December 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Payal Kapadia, 23 min, 2018)

Namdeo has learnt to live off the forest from his father. He stares at the treetops, searching for honey. The wind blows and afternoon descends on the small village by the jungle. Women of the village, whisper little secrets of their lost loves. Never seen, and only heard. A strange smoke emits from the ground, like a dream of a time gone by.

	Payal Kapadia is a Mumbai based filmmaker and artist. She studied Film Direction at the Film & Television Institute of India. Her short films AFTERNOON CLOUDS (2017) and AND WHAT IS THE SUMMER SAYING (2018) premiered respectively at the Cinéfondation and the Berlinale. Her first feature, A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING, is part of the 2021 Director's Fortnight selection.

Memoirs of Saira and Salim

20 December 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Eshwarya Grover, 14 min, 2018)

Seventeen years ago in 2002 communal riots in Ahmedabad, India took an ugly shape and a family was forced to abandon their burning house. The event meant to be buried under the debris unfolds when Saira and Salim share memories and conversations from a place they once called ‘home’.

Eshwarya is a film maker and visual artist from Jaipur, India. She studied Film & Video Communication at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Her visual style and narrative perspective develops with her background in architecture and film. Working with video, photographs and sound design, her work explores memory landscapes. She deals with subjects that feel the weight of time with memory acting as a silent, unresolved issue. Her short documentary, Memoirs of Saira & Salim, received an award at Tokyo Docs, Tokyo 2019 and best student film award at Film South Asia, Kathmandu, Nepal 2019. She is also a recipient of the Toto award by Toto Funds the Arts, India. Her projects are an attempt to create connection between disparate objects, discover herself through the process and express it following her own paths of inquiry.

The filmmakers will be in conversation with Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar on December 20th, 16:00-18:00 CET / 20:30-22:30 IST

Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayasankar are retired Professors from the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Their documentary films, which have been screened widely, have won 33 national and international awards. They write in the broad areas of censorship, documentary film and media and cultural studies. Their book, A Fly in the Curry (Sage, 2016), on independent Indian documentary, won a Special Mention for the best book on cinema at the National Film Awards, 2016. Their recent publications include the co-edited volumes, DigiNaka: Subaltern Politics and Digital Media in Post-Capitalist India, Orient Blackswan, 2020 and Many Voices, Many Worlds: Critical Perspectives on Community Media in India, Sage, 2021. More about their work at http://www.monteiro-jayasankar.com/.

December 13 19:30-22.00 CET
2nd THEATRE SCREENING at the Lumiere
(Rintu Thomas/Sushmit Ghosh, 92 min, 2021)

In a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, emerges India's only newspaper run by Dalit (oppressed caste) women. Armed with smartphones, Chief Reporter Meera and her journalists break traditions, be it on the frontlines of India's biggest issues or within the confines of their homes, redefining what it means to be powerful.

	Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh are award-winning director/ producers from India whose work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Tribeca Institute, Doc Society, SFF Film Fund, IDFA, The Bertha Foundation, Sorfond and the Finnish Film Foundation, among others. Rintu and Sushmit are also Sundance Fellows, who enjoy producing films that have the power to create transformative social impact. In 2009, they founded Black Ticket Films, a production company invested in the power of non-fiction storytelling with a strong eye for social justice stories. Five years in the making, Writing With Fire is their first feature documentary.
Discussant
	Malini Ghose, is presently completing her PhD at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen. She is one of the founding members of Nirantar, a New Delhi based resource centre for gender and education. She has worked in the field of education and women’s rights for nearly 30 years as a grassroots practitioner, trainer, material and curriculum developer, researcher and activist. She has been associated with Khabar Lahariya — the organization documented in the film — since the early 1990s. Malini has an M.A. in Political Science from the New School for Social Research, New York and a B.A. in Economics from Presidency College, Kolkata University.

After the screening, Malini Ghose (CeMIS) will be in conversation with Lalit Vachani (CeMIS), who will moderate a Q & A with the audience.

https://vimeo.com/r/3p0K/Sy5sWFJFeU

To use the discount code, you will have to log in with a Google/Vimeo/Facebook account and use the voucher code Gottingen2021 to avail the film free of charge. Due to licensing restrictions, the film can only be watched from Germany.

December 6 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Ekta Mittal, 80 min, 2018)

In a faraway village called birha, missing people, mothers and tired lovers yearn to see beyond the mist. They meet each other in impenetrable silences and endless mourning. They curse the moon for witnessing their insomnias. birha situates itself in a season of waiting, climate of uncertainty: where only a loud screech can register distance between loved ones.

birha is the grief, agony and anguish of separation, derived from Punjabi Sufi Poetry. Guided by Shiv Kumar Batalvi's birha poetry, the film captures the pain, lamentation and yearning caused by separation. The film searches for missing people, who left their homes to work in faraway cities, and have still not returned. The locations are not marked, characters are not named, birha situates itself in a season of waiting and a climate of uncertainty.

Ekta Mittal in conversation with Nicolas Jaoul (CNRS, Paris) and Nicole Wolf (Goldsmith's College, London)

	Ekta Mittal co-founded Maraa, amedia and arts collective in Bangalore (www.maraa.in ) in 2008. She works there as a practitioner, researcher, curator and facilitator around issues of gender, labour & caste in rural and urban contexts. She also works with creative practices in public space, through independent production and collaborations with other artists. She has been making films around labour, migration and cities since 2009. Her recent film birha is about separation and longing in the context of migration.
	Nicolas Jaoul is an anthropologist at the CNRS (France), specializing on the anti-caste movement in India on which he published a number of articles in academic journals. He followed the teachings of Jean Rouch in Nanterre and is interested in the links between documentary cinema and ethnography as well as in the aesthetic contribution of film makers to political subjectivities. Filmed during his thesis fieldwork at the end of the 1990s, "Sangharsh (Strife)" (Sister Productions, 2018, 105 minutes), his first film, portrays the political activism of the Dalit Panthers in the late 1990s Uttar Pradesh. His second film “Bariz (Paris). Street camp days” (Iskra Productions, 2020, 69 minutes, highlights the mobilization of newly arrived immigrants in Paris, where they squatted on the streets and defended their rights as asylum seekers which were denied by the french government.
	Nicole Wolf (Berlin/ London) is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research, pedagogical and curatorial projects have concentrated on political/feminist cinemas in South Asia, within anti-colonial struggles and more recently on decolonial agri/cultural practices and a Cinématics of the Soil. Recent publications are “Is this just a story? Friendships and fictions for speculative alliances. The Yugantar film collective (1980-83)”, in MIRAJ 7.2. "Fugitive Remains: Soil, Celluloid and Resistant Collectivities”, with Sheikh, Shela; Ros Gray; Filipa César; Raphaël Grisey, and Bouba Touré. In: Cooking Sections, ed. The Empire Remains Shop. New York: Columbia Books, 2018. “In the Wake of Gujarat: The Social Relations of Translation and Futurity”. Critical Studies, 4, 2019. She is editor of Grenzfälle, the first book on Merle Kröger und Philip Scheffner’s film and literary practice.

https://vimeo.com/347396065
Video password: nooran

The online screening discussion of Birha will take place on Monday, 6th December 2021 from 4.00 -6.00 PM CET / 8.30 -10.30 PM IST:

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)

	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.
	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 30^th of November.

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)

	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.
	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.
	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.

November 15 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(Pankaj Rishi Kumar, 53 min, 2019)

Deeply disturbed by a spate of honour killings, Indianostrum, a Pondicherry based theatre group, sets out to introspect the implications of caste, class and gender. They adapt Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to their story. What emerges is a critical reflection and commentary on the contemporary world, where love struggles to survive.

Pankaj Rishi Kumar will be in conversation with Shayoni Mitra (Barnard College, NYC). The session will be moderated by Nate Roberts (CeMIS).

	Pankaj Rishi Kumar is a one-man crew producing, directing, shooting and editing his own films. Since 2012 he has been actively documenting Pondicherry (a former French colony in India). Two Flags (2019), Janani's Juliet (2019) (India's official entry to Oscars) and To Die a Frenchman (in post production) are three films that engage with the Tamil French community, its people and reflect on the historical past of Pondicherry. Pankaj Rishi Kumar's films have been screened at film festivals all over the world, and he has received grant awards from Hubert Bals, IFA, Jan Vrijman Fund, Banff, Majlis, Sarai and Pad.ma. He was awarded an Asia Society fellowship at Harvard Asia Centre (2003), and is an alumnus of Asian Film Academy (Pusan) and Berlinale Talents (2016). He also curates and teaches regularly.
	Shayoni Mitra is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre, Barnard College, Columbia University. She teaches courses on performance theory, feminist politics and Asian theatre styles. Her writings have appeared in academic journals such as Contemporary Theatre Review, The Drama Review, Asian Theatre Journal, Economic and Political Weekly, and in news publications such as the Indian Express. She has been a Transnational Feminisms fellow at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and is on the executive board of American Society of Theatre Research. She lives in New York with her two daughters, and an exuberant rescue dog whose training is a work in progress.

November 8th, 16:00-18:00 CET/20:30-22:30 IST
(RV Ramani, 112 min, 2019)

Bhanumathi Rao, in her younger days, was a dancer and a theatre actor. Today in her mid-nineties, she lives with her two daughters – Maya Krishna Rao, a contemporary solo theatre practitioner based in Delhi and Tara Rao, who works as human rights campaigner in Bengaluru. Bhanumathi, an elegant and witty woman, whose hearing and memory doesn’t usually stand up, has led an enigmatic, passionate, yet a simple and pragmatic life. Filming Bhanumathi in Delhi and Bengaluru, with her daughters nudging her, the filmmaker takes the audience on a journey of life and performance, through the spasms of memory, complexities of relationships, love and a reflection of what could constitute a beautiful mind.

RV Ramani in conversation with Avijit Mukul Kishore (Filmmaker and Cinematographer) and Rahul Roy (Filmmaker and Cinematographer)

	R.V. Ramani, born in Mumbai, 1957, graduated in Physics from Mumbai University. He worked as a Photojournalist in Mumbai and later graduated from the Film and TV Institute of India, Pune, in 1985, with specialization in Motion Picture Photography. He moved to Chennai in 1990. Since then, over the years, he has established a unique style of his own, making independent impressionistic documentaries, which has found recognition both in India and abroad. He has travelled widely with his films and his films and Retrospectives have been presented in many International Film Festivals.
	Avijit Mukul Kishore is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Mumbai. He studied cinematography at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and holds a bachelor's degree in History from Hindu College, University of Delhi. Kishore works in documentary films and inter-disciplinary moving-image practices. He is involved in cinema pedagogy as a lecturer, writer and curator of film programmes. He frequently collaborates with visual artists, architects and academics on video and film based works. Kishore's work has been widely screened at film festivals, art and academic fora. His films as director include The Garden of Forgotten Snow, Squeeze Lime in Your Eye, Nostalgia for the Future, Vertical City, To Let the World In and Snapshots from a Family Album. His films as cinematographer include Lovely Villa - Architecture as Autobiography, Kumar Talkies, John and Jane, Seven Islands and a Metro, Bidesia in Bambai, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Kali Salwaar (The Black Garment), I am Micro and An Old Dog’s Diary.
	Rahul Roy graduated from the Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 1987 with a post graduate degree in film making. His films have travelled across the globe to various documentary film festivals and have won several prestigious awards. Rahul Roy has made a series of films that explore the themes of masculinity and gender relations against the larger backdrop of labour, class identities and urban spaces. Besides directing his own films Roy has produced several documentaries and two fiction films in the South Asian region. His graphic book on masculinities titled ‘A Little Book on Men’ was published by Yoda Press. And he has has co-edited (with Dr. Deepak Mehta) a volume titled* Violence and The Quest For Justice In South Asia* for a SAGE/Yoda imprint

Synopsis: In the end, being there is all that matters. Mani, Sini and Dr. Reena are a team of counselor, nurse and doctor working for a palliative care organisation in New Delhi. Within 48 hours of receiving a call through the helpline, they reach out to provide medical care and emotional support through weekly home visits. Their job is not an easy one because they can’t offer the one thing which patients and their families are desperately looking for – a cure. What they can offer instead is to assist the patient in accepting that dying is a normal process, a part of life.

Director Farida Pacha and cinematographer Lutz Konermann in conversation with Emilija Zabiliuté (University of Copenhagen)

	National Award winning documentary filmmaker, Farida Pacha was born in Mumbai, India in 1972 and studied filmmaking at Southern Illinois University, USA. Her debut feature documentary, My Name is Salt (2013), has screened at over 80 festivals and won 34 awards including the main prizes at IDFA, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Madrid and Mumbai film festivals. Interested in exploring the human condition, Farida approaches reality in a poetic and exploratory way. She relies on a distinctive observational style to tell intimate stories that slowly unfold over time.
	A multiple award winning director, screen writer, cinematographer and producer, Lutz Konermann has been credited on more than a hundred fiction and documentary films, including international co-productions. Watch Over Me is the latest documentary in a long-standing collaboration with Farida Pacha. The cinematography of her feature-length debut, My Name is Salt, won him several awards, amongst which the prestigious German Camera Award in 2014.
	Emilija Zabiliūtė (PhD) is an anthropologist working on care, illness, social and health vulnerabilities and kinship among India’s urban poor. She is interested in how experiences of health crises and poverty crises rearrange social relationships, ethics of care and redefine possibilities for life. Her research explores public health, chronic illness, and everyday economies and transitions to cashlessness in urban India. She has published academic journal articles and opinion pieces on community care ethics, gender, chronic illness, urban poverty and everyday digital payments in urban India. She is based at the University of Copenhagen and University of Edinburgh.

Screening Link: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/watchoverme/
Please use the promo code cr0ss1ngs to avail the film free of charge. A registration with the platform Vimeo will be necessary. Due to licensing restrictions, the film can only be watched from Germany.