[Reader-list] Films @ Sarai

[Aarti Sethi]

[[FILM]]


temporary loss of consciousness
35 mins, Colour, India, 2005
A film by Monica Bhasin
6:00 P.M, Friday, 15 September 2006
Sarai-CSDS Seminar Room

‘temporary loss of consciousness’ alludes to the recurring  
displacement of populations in the Indian subcontinent from the time  
of Partition (1947) to the present. The film explores the ideas of  
borders, boundaries, limits and forbidden spaces that generate vast  
expanses of wastelands of human emotion and action. Treated as a  
poetic essay the film tracesthese ideas through the voices of those  
that live in exile in the Indian subcontinent. It has been shot in  
New Delhi apart from the borders of India - Pakistan and India and  
Bangladesh.
Falling in the genre of Experimental Documentary, the film constructs  
meaning through juxtaposition of several elements like found footage  
of Independence/Partition, constructed narratives spoken in the  
respective languages of the affected populace and abstractions of  
abandoned spaces or spaces of refuge. Characters from ‘Toba Tek  
Singh’, a short story by Saadat Hasan Manto, are woven into the  
structure and the spoken narratives are poetic in character, speaking  
of longing and belonging, home and honour, loss and betrayal,  
boundaries and crossings.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Monica Bhasin,  
the director of the film.

[Monica Bhasin is a filmmaker/editor who graduated from the School of  
the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2004. She is previously a graduate  
of the Mass CommunicationResearch Center, Jamia Millia Islamia  
University (1992) New Delhi, India. For many years she worked as an  
editor for documentary films in Delhi and she recently completed her  
first non-fiction film called temporary loss of consciousness. The  
film has screened at the Indo American Art Council Film Festival  
2005, New York as well as at the Mumbai International FilmFestival  
for Documentaries, Shorts and Animation, 2006, Mumbai.]


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Saacha (The Loom)49 Mins,
English and Marathi versions, 2001
A film by K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro
7:00 P.M., Friday, 15 September 2006
Sarai-CSDS Seminar Room
Second Prize, New Delhi Video Forum, 2001

Saacha is about  a poet, a painter and a city. The poet is Narayan  
Surve, and the painter Sudhir Patwardhan. The city is the city of  
Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), the birth place of the Indian textile  
industry and the industrial working class. Both the protagonists have  
been a part of the left cultural movement in the city. Weaving  
together poetry and paintings with accounts of the artists and  
memories of the city, the film explores the modes and politics of  
representation, the relevance of art in the contemporary social  
milieu, the decline of the urban working class in an age of  
structural adjustment, the dilemmas of the left and the trade union  
movement and the changing face of a huge metropolis.
The screening will be followed with a discussion with the directors,  
Anjali Monteiro and K.P. Jayashankar.

[Anjali Monteiro is Professor, and K.P. Jayasankar is Professor and  
Chair, Centre for  Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of  
Social Sciences.  Monteiro has a Masters degree in Economics and a  
Ph.D. in Sociology. Jayasankar has an M.A. in German language and a  
Ph.D. in Humanities and Social Sciences. Both of them are involved in  
media production, teaching and research. Jointly they have won  
thirteen national and international awards for their films. A  
presiding thematic of much of their work has been problematising of  
notions of self and the other, of normality and deviance, of the  
local and the global, through the exploration of diverse narratives  
and rituals. They have several papers in the area of media and  
cultural studies and have contributed to scholarly journals such as  
Cultural Studies.]



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