[Reader-list] [Announcements] 25.7.03: Words on Water PREMIERE

[PUKAR Monsoon]

Dear Friends:

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) cordially 
invites you to the Mumbai premiere of the documentary film "Words on 
Water", followed by a discussion with director SANJAY KAK.

This film screening is part of our week-long PUKAR Monsoon Symposium, 
from 19-26 July 2003. "Words on Water" (85 minutes, 2002, 
English/Hindi) is writted and directed by Sanjay Kak, edited by 
Sameera Jain and Reena Mohan, with photography by Sanjay Kak and 
Ranjan Palit, location sound by Samina Mishra, and music composed and 
sung by Rahul Ram, Amit Kilam and Asheem Chakravarty.


Date:
FRIDAY 25 JULY 2003
6.00 P.M. to 8.00 P.M.

At:
PUKAR
c/o Aragon Services
4th Floor, Kitab Mahal
Dr Dadabhai Naoroji Road
Mumbai 400001

Kitab Mahal is next to New Excelsior Cinema, and is near VT Station. 
Entrance to Kitab Mahal is from the New Book Company on Dadabhai 
Naoroji Road. Lift is available to the third floor.


ABOUT THE FILM

For almost twenty years, the banks of the Narmada River in central 
India have been the site of a remarkable struggle for human dignity. 
Faced with the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people by a 
gargantuan series of thirty dams, and the abject failure by the 
Indian government to resettle the displaced, the Narmada valley has 
thrown up a unique people's movement. "Words on Water" is a film that 
explores the contemporary contours of this resistance, as the 
struggle to save the Narmada -- the Narmada Bachao Andolan -- faces 
its most critical reverse, a verdict from the highest court of the 
land, which places the establishment's seal of the approval on the 
Sardar Sarovar dam, a colossal misadventure with multiple, 
irreversible consequences.

"Words on Water" is about the transaction between power and 
powerlessness in the most populous democracy in the world, in a clash 
that is at once both intensely traditional and urgently modern.  For 
the struggle over the dam contains within it many of the 
contradictions of Indian society. The contestation over scarce 
resources, the debate on the model of development chosen, and the 
nature of society itself, which allows the powerful to cannibalize 
those lower down in the hierarchies of caste and class, and pass it 
off as development.  Inevitably, the Narmada valley has also become a 
testing ground for the new mantra of globalization, as international 
capital comes sweeping in, looking for new opportunities (and 
unrestrained profits) in the pockets of the impoverished Developing 
World. The valley boasts of India's first privatized hydro project, 
the Maheshwar Dam, although resistance by the people has already 
driven off investor after investor.

But more than anything else, at a time when violence rages like a 
bush fire across the parched surface of Indian democracy, when 
resistance movements in the tribal margins of Indian society have 
steadily taken to the gun, the struggle in the Narmada valley 
continues to take its cues from the Gandhian notions of ahimsa 
(non-violence) and satyagraha (the force of truth). So ultimately 
this is not just a film about the decimation (by drowning) of the 
poor, the deceit of a political class, or the complicity of a 
powerful social class, which stands to gain by the centralization of 
natural resources. Words on Water is about sustained resistance, a 
non-violent, even joyous, defiance, which empowers you to struggle 
for your rights, yet saves you from the ultimate humiliation of 
violence, in which the resistance gets re-made in the image of its 
oppressor.


ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

SANJAY KAK is an independent documentary film-maker whose film, in 
the forest hangs a bridge (1999), won the Golden Lotus for Best 
Documentary Film at the 1999 National Film Awards in India. The film 
also won the Asian Gaze Award at the Pusan Short Film Festival, 
Korea. His recent work includes One Weapon (1997), a video about 
democracy in the 50th year of Indian independence, and Harvest of 
Rain (1995), made in association with the Centre for Science & 
Environment, New Delhi.

His films on the theme of migration, looking at people of Indian 
origin in the fringes of the city of London, This Land, My Land, 
Eng-Land! (1993), and in post-apartheid South Africa, A House and a 
Home (1993) have been widely screened at documentary festivals. He 
has also produced and directed Cambodia: Angkor Remembered (1990), a 
reflection on the monument and its place in Khmer society.

Born in Pune, India in 1958, Sanjay Kak attended St Stephen's 
College, Delhi and the Delhi School of Economics where he read 
Economics and Sociology. His early training in film was as 
writer/researcher on a shoestring black and white popular science 
series for Indian television. His first independent documentary 
Kinnaur Ke Log (1983) was an account of a year in the life of a 
Himalayan shepherd boy, followed by Savdhan! Bacche Khel Rahe Hain 
(Caution! Children at Play, 1984) is about the remedial uses of drama 
in the therapy of disabled children. His video Geeli Mitti (The Wet 
Earth) was awarded the Silver Lotus at the 1985 National Film Awards 
in India.

In 1986 he helped found Octave Communications, a New Delhi based 
production company, which he still runs. To support his interest in 
the documentary film Sanjay has also worked extensively in 
television, where his work includes the seven-part travelogue 
Pradakshina: Journey Down the Ganga (1985-86). Between 1985-87 he 
also directed a series of Hindi language news documentaries for 
India's national television Doordarshan, including Punjab: Doosra 
Adhyaya (Punjab: Chapter Two), and Kiski Ganga? (Whose River Is It?). 
Sanjay lives in New Delhi where he is active in the documentary film 
movement.

_____

PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research)
P.O. Box 5627, Dadar, Mumbai 400014, INDIA

E-Mail <mailto:secretariat at pukar.org.in>
Phone +91 (022) 2207 7779, +91 98200 45529, +91 98204 04010
Web Site http://www.pukar.org.in
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