[Reader-list] Sarai Screening Series- Rahul Roy's 'The Factory'

[The Sarai Programme]

The Sarai Programme invites you as part of its 'The Wager on Cinema'
screening series for the screening of Rahul Roy's 'The Factory'

The respondents for this film are Jeebesh Bagchi and Prabhu Mohapatra

About 'The Wager on Cinema'-
How do we estimate the value, aesthetic force, and meaning of cinema today?
As media experience, technological change has transformed it beyond
recognition, its material forms altered by analog and digital video
formats, and the modes of circulating, viewing, accessing cinema and making
it have expanded exponentially. And yet, the dream and ambition of cinema
as we have known it has not dissipated, the desire to congregate audiences
to participate in a distinct world of experience, whether to excite, amuse,
to move or to solicit reflection and engagement, to bear witness and to
mobilize.

For us at Sarai, the wager on cinema carries high stakes. It means renewing
a pact with a bid to explore experience, to take film technique as a
vehicle of the unexpected, making connections that take us aback, working
out strategies to navigate media's capacity to deceive - to sting the
audience as much as expose secretive acts - through a forensic analytics,
through ethical calibration, but also playfully, ironically. For us, such a
wager also places emphasis on process, how things are done, how techniques
are used, what evidence is presented, what judgments are made, how publics
are engaged, framing the cinema as an act of research. In this series,
Sarai will screen films to shift focus, to conjure up unusual images and
sounds, novel techniques and subject matter, and will organise discussions
with practitioners, researchers and an interested public to renew our
investment in the cinema, to capture what it means in our times.

Synopsis of 'The Factory'-Dir. Rahul Roy, 132 mins
147 workers of India’s biggest automobile manufacturing company Maruti
Suzuki are on trial for the murder of a senior manager and 2500 workers
dismissed. It has been two and a half years and the case drags on. Their
bail application has been rejected by the courts. On each hearing they are
led to the court room by the police while families line up to catch a
glimpse. The defence lawyers plan their strategy in the court canteen.
Justice seems a dim hope. The film follows the fate of the under trial
workers, families and dismissed workers to investigate the underbelly of
industrial conflict and the elusive nature of justice.

Rahul Roy is a filmmaker whose films have travelled across the globe to
various documentary film festivals and have won several prestigious awards.

Jeebesh Bagchi is member of the Raqs Media Collective

Prabhu Mohapatra is a Historian at the University of Delhi

Tea will be served at 3.30pm