DIRECTORS AT IDFFB 2023
After completing his Bachelors in Sociology from Delhi University, Prateek Shekhar did his Masters in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai.Prateek’s debut short documentary film Chai Darbari (2019) won the Best Short Documentary award at the 12th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), India and was screened at numerous film festivals.In 2023, Prateek completed his debut feature length documentary Chardi Kala - An Ode to Resilience on the year-long farmers’ protest against the Indian government's unjust farm law; the film premiered and won Second Best Short Documentary Award at the 15th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), India.
Ruchika Negi is a filmmaker and educator, with an interest in critical and creative pedagogical practices. Her films include Every Time You Tell A Story, Malegaon Times and ML 05 6055. She has been awarded artistic residencies at Khoj (New Delhi), Parco Arte Vivente Experimental Centre for Contemporary Art (Turin) and Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski (Warsaw), and is the recipient of Charles Wallace India Trust- Short Term Fellowship (2016). Ruchika was core faculty at the Creative Documentary Course (Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication, New Delhi) from 2015-19, and occasionally teaches film at the Ashoka University, Sonipat. Currently, she is Associate Editor at The Third Eye, a feminist learning platform supported by Nirantar Trust.
Lipika Singh Darai is a film director and editor based in Odisha, India. She studied filmmaking at the Film and Television Institute of India and specialized in sound recording and design. Her films have been screened across the globe including all major Indian Film Festivals. She has been a juror in various film festivals in India. She has received four National Film Awards for direction, sound recording, and narration of a film. Her latest feature documentary BACKSTAGE produced by the Films Division of India had its world premiere at the 39th Asolo Art Film Festival 2021, Italy in the feature competition. Her new film NIGHT AND FEAR (Raati o Bhaya) a Film
Essay had its world premiere at the 52nd International Film Festival Rotterdam 2023, in Ammodo Tiger Short Competition
Debalina Majumder is an independent filmmaker, cameraperson, and photographer based in Kolkata, India. In a career spanning more than a quarter of a century, Debalina has worked in various entertainment and news industry segments.
Nausheen is an independent filmmaker working on gender perspectives amid conflict and political unrest in contemporary times.Land of My Dreams is her first self-funded feature-length documentary film, which won Best Long Documentary at the 2023 International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala.
Amit Mahanti is a filmmaker, cinematographer and editor based in New Delhi.
Farha is a filmmaker-editor from India. She is a two-time recipient of the President’s National Film Award for Best Film on Social Issues for her directorial debut, I am Bonnie, and her first feature-length film, Holy Rights. The film was broadcast on KLIK Indonesia and SBS Australia. Both films have bagged prestigious awards and were widely screened.
With a background in filmmaking and journalism, Miriam Chandy Menacherry's brand of socially conscious film intersects with popular culture. Her films premiered at IDFA Amsterdam and were nominated for the Alliance of Women Film Journalists' EDA Awards.
For the past ten years, the young writer, director, and producer Varrun Sukhraj has worked in film and advertisement at various levels. His documentary Too Much Democracy on the unprecedented farmers’ movement in India in 2020 is garnering praise in India and worldwide. His filmography includes Kal Ki Umid and Naammatra.
Himanshu S Khatua is the Director of SRFTI Kolkata. He began his career as the sound recordist and sound designer in the film Indradhanura Chhai. The debut feature film, Shunya Swaroopa, won the National Award for Best Oriya Film at the 44th National Film Festival.
FILMS AT IDFFB 2023
RUUPOSH
DIR : Md Fehmeed and Zeeshan Amir Khan
Ruuposh explores the struggles of a Muslim family separated by the partition of India as they try to reconnect despite years of pain, estrangement, and political turmoil.
THE VOLUNTEER ARCHIVISTS
DIR :Subhashish Panigrahi
Collective negligence is threatening two centuries of printed publications in Odia, one of India's official languages. Volunteer archivists struggle against all odds, including legal battles, to digitise crumbling books.
NIGHT AND FEARDIR
DIR :Lipika Singh Darai
The residuals of recorded material generated by the filmmaker over a decade of filmmaking practice, with the passing of time, have acquired new meaning. Having a twofold interior, Night and Fear is a personal essay addressed to the filmmaker’s grand aunt, but also a reflection on the impact of making films—on the filmmaker herself and the society.
WITH QUIETUDE... TO NIRAD
DIR :Joshy Joseph
With Quietude— To Nirad is a chamber drama in its form and an encounter of two souls discussing cinema and life.
RAATDIR
DIR : Ruchika Negi
What is that you can see at night? What is allowed, what is not? What do you become a witness to? Camera in hand, some women and men from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Jharkhand venture out to record the experience of nights in small town India. Who is watching and who is being watched? Are nights crafted in silence? Is there still movement, labour that is invisibilised? Who has access to the night? Who hides inside?
CITIES OF SLEEP
DIR : Shaunak Sen
The film explores the challenges of the homeless to find a safe place to sleep around the areas of Loha Pul and Meena Bazaar in Delhi.
BRAIR KANI (CAT'S ATTIC)
DIR : Nundrisha Wakhloo and Daksh Punj
Brair Kani explores an ancestral house located in Srinagar, Kashmir. The film uses the attic as a site of reflection and navigates the relationship between space, belonging, and personal history. The house spirits inhabiting the confines of the attic exist simultaneously as carriers of collective memory and as manifestations of the emotional landscape.
THE SPIRIT DREAMS OF CHERAW
DIR : Shilpika Bordoloi
Mau: The Spirit Dreams of Cheraw is a documentary film from Mizoram, through Cheraw (Bamboo dance)and ritual folklore, revealing the forgotten memory of the story of the mother who dies at childbirth.
CHARDI KALA : AN ODE TO RESILIENCE
DIR : Prateek Shekher
Amidst the indescribable spirit of eternal optimism, the many acts of selfless service, and articulate criticism, there is a memorable tale of everyday resilience and the solemn triumph of India’s farmers as they protested for more than a year against the Indian government’s unjust farm laws.
THE LEOPARD'S TRIBE
DIR : Miriam Chandy Menacherry
An indigenous family find they are at the centre of an imaginative battle to preserve the green lungs of India’s commercial capital and the leopard the tribe worships.
WHAT THE FIELDS REMEMBER?
DIR : Subasri Krishnan
Aftermath of Nellie massacre of 1983, where close to 3,000-4,000 people were killed in Assam. It led to the Assam Accord and the disbanding of anti-foreigner agitation by AASU (All Assam Students' Union) - the families of victims still await justice.
BEYOND THE BLUESDIR
DIR : Debalina Majumder
What does it mean to break binaries and queer them too? Beyond the Blues is the story of Neel and Shamu in their individual and collective journeys of breaking and unmaking binaries, never settling down in the comfort of borders and categorisations. It is the story of finding love and resilience in quiet corners, feline kinships, and vibrant rainbow colours.
LAND OF MY DREAMSDIR
DIR : Nausheen Khan
The Government of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), making religion a criterion for citizenship and intended to exclude Muslims. Working-class women gathered in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, and began a nonviolent sit-in protest against this discriminatory practice. Land of My Dreams is a recollection of what followed.
TWO AUTUMNS IN WYSZOGROD
DIR : Amit Mahanti, Ruchika Negi
An object buried underwater for more than 70 years resurfaces. Scraps of twisted metal, fragments left over from a war. What are the memories that come alive? What are the questions that revive?
A RIFLE AND A BAG
DIR : Arya Rothe, Cristina Hanes, Isabella Rinaldi
Somi and her husband are striving to forge a new identity after fighting alongside the Naxalites, a communist guerrilla group waging war on the Indian State since the '60s. After a decade of armed struggle for the rights of their tribal communities, the couple deserted the movement and surrendered to the police. They have been trying to educate their son and reconcile their violent past with the desire to integrate into Indian society.
IQRAARNAAMA
DIR : Priyanka Chhabra
In the grand narrative of the Partition of Punjab in 1947, Iqraarnaama is a film about the 'refugee', 'migrant', and 'displaced person' as the protagonist of their own story told through a collection of documents from the personal archive of Charandas Bangia, a Partition refugee from Lyallpur, Pakistan who finally settled in Amritsar, India. The film decenters historical narratives from the state to the citizen, from state archives to personal archives, looking at history from the perspective of those who experience it.
MOVING UPSTREAM : GANGA
DIR : Shridhar Sudhir
This documentary, filmed on a 3000km walk along the River Ganga by Siddharth Agarwal, is part of Veditum India Foundation’s Moving Upstream project. The walk occurred between June 2016 and April 2017, starting from Ganga Sagar in West Bengal and finishing at Gangotri in Uttarakhand. Initially intended to document the river and life of the riparian community of River Ganga, the project attempts to amplify the voices and concerns of the river people, woven together through the walk medium.
HOLY RIGHTS
DIR : Farha Khatun
Safia, a deeply religious Muslim woman from Bhopal in Central India, believes that patriarchal mindset of 'Sharia' interpreters, denies Muslim women, equality and justice. She joins a program that trains women as Qazis, (Muslim clerics who interpret and administer the personal law), which is traditionally a male preserve..
FROM THE SHADOWS
DIR : Miriam Chandy Menacherry
An artist relentlessly sprays silhouettes on public walls tagged #missing. An activist accompanies rescued girls across international borders. Parallel narratives intersect to reveal a sliver of hope when women imaginatively challenge a powerful trafficking nexus operating in a country where, every 8 minutes, a child goes missing.
TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY
DIR : Varrun Sukhraj
In November 2020, Indian farmers marched towards Delhi to mark their protests against the Indian Government's new Farm Bills. Too Much Democracy explores this remarkable event, where the backbones of India braved the coldest nights and the hottest days on the tar roads, emphasizing the importance of democracy, the voice of the people, and their role in nation-building. This documentary features inputs from eminent experts, leaders, and several farmers who participated in the protests. It is a modest attempt to comprehensively picture the much-maligned protests in right-leaning national media and the general popular imagination.
THE SEA AND THE SEVEN VILLAGES
DIR : Himanshu Khatua
Sea level rise along the Bay of Bengal, coastal erosion, frequent cyclones, and mismanagement of coastal land have destroyed homes, agricultural lands, and the entire settlement of Seven Villages of Kendrapara district of Odisha, and people suffered from forced migration. The film depicts stories of the displaced coastal communities of Satabhaya Villages.
LETTER UNWRITTEN TO NAIYER MASUD
DIR : Shahi AJ
A group of readers pilgrimages to a writer's ancestral house nested in the heart of a city that haunts all of his stories. This turns into an exploration of the city, an exercise in mapmaking and a hallucinatory encounter with the real.
ARIBAM SYAM SHARMA
DIR :Joshy Joseph
Joshy Joseph’s Aribam Syam Sharma-Laparoscopic Cinemascapes featuring the veteran Aribam Syam Sharma – now in his late 80s – is an intimate encounter with the rich and complex dimensions of an oral culture, Manipuri to be specific, and a wise, enlightened soul nourished and nurtured by it emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. The mellow wisdom of an entire culture spreads gently and softly as the venerable Aribam Syam Sharma talks to Joshy, opening up the subtle layers of a culture that holds myriad ways of life endearingly and expansively.
SOMOYER JANALAGULI
(WINDOWS OF TIME)
DIR : Mrinmoy Nandi
The filmmaker approached many unknown people residing in different parts of Bengal and eastern India in the first lockdown period in 2020 to participate in the “documentation of lockdown” programme, and eventually, most of them responded very spontaneously with their available digital devices. Twenty-three people (i.e., 23 cameras) shot this film.
