It is often said that a film should either entertain, engage, or educate (not in the same order though). And in our country, one obsessed with cinema, we expect a film to entertain us and make everything larger than life and extraordinary.
One evening, last year, I finally coaxed my mother to sit down and take pause from constantly running around the house. I had been following her around for days to have this conversation. Sometimes, she silently smiled, and at other times, she eluded me. But that evening, she let her guard down.
Rafina’s parents call her a free bird. What happens when this free bird goes back to her nest and investigates all that helped her ride the wind? Wearing the heavy hats of both filmmaker and daughter, Rafina asks tough questions to her parents amidst birthday cakes, cows, and abstract drawing books in this autobiographical documentation.
In 2013, Nirantar produced a short documentary on the non-binary experience in schools. Featuring Nrrups, Sunil and Rajarshi, the film travels from Kolkata to Bengaluru to Thane to meet people for whom school was the brutal part of their childhood.
In this 28-minute documentary, we meet Umra and Kulsum originally from Banda, Uttar Pradesh, and now firmly finding their feet in New Delhi. Between theories of gender and migration, diktats of danger and safety, lie the lived experiences of young women in big cities, pursuing an adventure as big as the skies they build their one room homes in.
Since December of 2014, The Green Hub in Tezpur, Assam, has turned teachers, forest guards, footballers, field guides, students and youth-at-large, from across the varied landscapes of the north east of India, into documentary filmmakers.
What is the difference between a working womb, and a womb that goes to work? TTE in conversation with Surabhi Sharma about her documentary Can We See the Baby Bump Please?
