17th Social Justice Film Festival, Chennai
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan : Some Moments!
Monday, January 8, 2024
Saturday, March 25, 2023
17th Social Justice Film Festival 2023
17th Social Justice Film Festival 2023
28-30 April, Goethe-institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Chennai
Curated by Amudhan R.P.
Dr.Ambedkar
Film screenings, interactions, special lectures and more!
We welcome you all!
Jointly organised by MARUPAKKAM & Goethe-institut, Chennai
More details soon!
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Fortnightly Film Screenings @ Anna University, Chennai
Fortnightly Film Screenings & Interactions
Organised by Department of Media Sciences, CEG Campus,
Anna University, Guindy, Chennai
16 March 2023 / 2 pm / Mahakavi Subramaniya Bharathiyar Hall
Curated by Amudhan R.P.
Films :
Chun Chun Mati (Dir : Sanjay Barnela; 10.35 min; Documentary)
This cine-poem, Chun Chun Maati, attempts to evoke the eternal spirit of pastoral communities roaming with their animals across the planet in a way of life that is deeply attuned to nature, bringing out their resilience, fortitude and the value of impermanence! Where else would you come across people who live by the maxim, "everyday uncertainty is a certainty"!
Small Time Cinema (Dir : Priya Naresh ; 29 min; Documentary)
Small-Time Cinema is a documentary that follows two Youtube filmmaking groups, one living in Balochistan, Pakistan, and one, in Assam, India. The film follows these groups, as they make space for their complex history and cultures, beyond a blanket Indian or Pakistani identity.
Dukhu Majhi - Son of the barren land (Dir : Somnath Mondal; 28.25 min; Documentary)
This documentary is regarding a relentless struggle of a solitary man in his unique way to save the mother earth.
The old man - Dukhu Majhi lives in the district of Purulia (W. Bengal), where the temperature rises upto 50 degree Celsius in the summer. He had somehow been inspired by his father in childhood and later on by a Govt. campaign on the need of plantation. There he came to know how trees invite rain and supply oxygen in the environment. He also feels that people need shadows from the scorching sun.
My Heart is an Ocean (Dir : Tanvi Jadwani; 21.30 min; Short fiction)
As the water recedes the reclaimed shore of Mumbai every evening, three children living on its shore in a small fishing ghetto come out to play on this temporary playground. The sea dictates game of the day. On a lucky day when herons are spotted hovering over the sea, it's a day to catch fish in shallow waters. One evening after fish are caught, Chirag declares that he wants to take all the fish home to build the biggest aquarium anyone has ever seen. This leads to a fight among playmates.
Banana Republic (Dir : Anas Rashad; 8.40 min; Short fiction)
A traditional family discovers the joy of having their daughter-in-law convert to their faith. However, after meeting their son, the excitement is short-lived.
Missing Since 6.12.1956 (Dir : Anand Pande; 19.58 min; Short fiction)
As the largest democracy, India takes pride in its freedom fighters, social reformists and policymakers. Today, this pride is demonstrated in the form of "hero worship" by erecting statues; displaying photos and mass celebrating the birth and death anniversaries... ignoring the key messages and thoughts propagated by the leaders.
This short film begins with two teachers at a government school in a small village finding out that they must be ready overnight for a surprise inspection by the senior government official in the morning. But they are missing an important photo from the school office wall. The photo is of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.
We welcome you all!
A MARUPAKKAM INITIATIVE
Sunday, February 5, 2023
2nd Freedom Film Festival 2023
2nd Freedom Film Festival 2023
15-19 Aug, multiple veneus, Chennai
Organised by MARUPAKKAM
As India celebrates her Independence Day on every 15th August, the film festival we organise aims to discuss and debate the freedom that some of us enjoy and many of us don't have access to.
Are we really free people? How many hurdles we face every day both internally and externally while fighting for our freedom?
How much we are tied to our Class, Caste, Gender, Race or Religion or for that matter Nation?
The film festival invites films from across the world from the artists who imagine a world where we all achieve our freedom.
Rules and Regulations :
1) Documentaries, Short fiction, experiment films, animation films and music videos based on FREEDOM as a theme (open to your interpretation) are accepted.
2) Films should have subtitles in English (if required).
3) Anyone from across the globe can send any number of entries.
4) Films that propagate hatred and violence will not be accepted.
5) Screening fee will not be paid to the selected films
6) It is a non competitive event.
7) Entry fee will not be returned
8) One representative per selected film will be provided a simple stay in Chennai during the film festival for 3 days. No travel support will be provided.
9) A moderate entry fee will be collected from the audience
10) Film festival will be offline / physical depending on the local restrictions. Online interactions will be organised with the filmmakers who can't physically participate.
Deadline : 1st June 2023
Notification Date : 1 August 2023
Amudhan R.P.
Festival Director
Freedom Film Festival
Tuesday, February 22, 2022
10th CIDSFF 2022 : Venue - Periyar Thidal, Chennai
10th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022
21-27 Feb, multiple venues, Chennai
Venue : Periyar Thidal, Chennai
Jointly organised by Self Respect Media and MARUPAKKAM
23 Feb 2022, Wednesday
5.30 pm
Moving Upstream : Ganga (Dir : Shridhar Sudhir; 105 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
The 'Moving Upstream: Ganga’ documentary was filmed over 6 months on a 3000km walk along River Ganga in India. This documentary explores the idea of walking, people’s responses to a walking traveler in this fast paced era and an evolving relationship with the natural world. It does this while also amplifying the voices and concerns of the riparian community.
Backstage (Dir: Lipika Singh Darai; 85 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
The film portrays the lives and times of puppeteers of Odisha, India. It documents four forms of puppetry; the glove, the string, the rod and the shadow, which are now being performed by their last generation of artists. After them, the art form will probably die. The folk art form, which is as vulnerable as its performers who mostly belong to the lower strata of the society in terms of caste and economy, is experiencing a silent death. The filmmaker builds a personal narrative to trace the time a dying art form is going through.
Perceptions from a Modern Witch Hunt : The Making of a She-Devil
(Dir : Sourav Roychowdhury; 45.44 min; Documentary; India; Non competition)
Perceptions from a Modern Witch Hunt: The Making of a She-Devil is a social documentary about a Witch Hunt that took place in 2017, in Bardhaman district of West Bengal, India.
25 Feb 2022, Friday
11 am
Ushiku (Dir : Thomas Ash; 87 min; Documentary; Japan; Non competition)
“Ushiku” takes viewers deep into the psychological and physical environment inhabited by foreign detainees in one of the largest immigration detention facilities in Japan. On the eve of Japan's recent--and highly contentious--immigration reform efforts, the filmmaker eludes press embargoes the government has imposed on its immigration facilities, bringing viewers into immediate contact with the detainees, many of whom are refugees seeking asylum
2 pm
Longing (Dir : Bani Singh; 89.42 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Against the backdrop of Partition, newly independent India’s first hockey team defeats England, their erstwhile coloniser, to win the Gold at the 1948 London Olympics.
Six decades later, when Nandy Singh, a member of this iconic team suffers a stroke at the age of 84, his tenacious will to recover inspires his daughter to go on a journey to discover the champion he was before she was born.
Charaiveti (Dir : Bauddhayan Mukherji, Chandan Biswas; 71.56 min; Documentary; India;; Non competition)
In February 2017, Chandan Biswas, a resident of Barasat, West Bengal set off on his bicycle on an arduous journey of 153 days, traversing 6249 kms, crisscrossing 4 different countries to become the first man to complete the Trans-Himalayan expedition on a bicycle.
Armed with a fixed lens go pro camera, Chandan shot this incredible and spectacular journey of his and came back with a footage of over 52 hours. Charaiveti was born out of this very footage.
5.15 pm
Nasima (Dir : Heather Kissinger; 85.20 min; Documentary; USA / Bangladesh; Non competition)
A little girl’s dream of riding the waves threatens to change the course of history for an entire nation.
Selling trinkets on the beach, 7 year old Nasima’s attention is caught by something out on the water and immediately she is transfixed: surfing has come to Bangladesh. Nasima instantly knows what she wants and that is to surf the waves. She will become the first female surfer in Bangladesh, a place where women don’t even swim in public, let alone ride waves.
Footloose - a story of belonging (Dir : Gulshan Singh; 93.38 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Minorities from Pakistan & Myanmar came to India to save their lives. They had heard that Indian is a secular country where there is no religious discrimination. But, in the last few years, religious discrimination has increased leading to communal riots which ultimately ended up being the sole agenda for contesting elections.
26 Feb 2022, Saturday
3.30 pm
Land of Women (Dir : Marion Gaborit; 77.19 min; Documentary; France; Non competition)
"Land of women" tell the story of five women farmers around the world, working the land, which plays a key role in the planet’s food production. A tribute to some of these women, invisible but essential links in the chain who ensure subsistence agriculture every day and everywhere on earth.
Once upon a Village (Dir : Srishti Lakhera; 60.14 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
In the Himalayan foothills, an 80- year- old woman and a 19-year-old girl are two of the seven remaining inhabitants of an abandoned village. The two women struggle with the choice to leave for an alienating city life or continue living in a lonely village.
Incomplete Sentence (Dir : Adar Bozbay; 58.05 min; Documentary; Turkey; Non competition)
Aslı Erdoğan, world-renowned author and activist, has fallen into silence after she fled to Germany. Incomplete Sentences is a feature documentary on her literature and life, leading to exile in Frankfurt, after the Turkish regime’s oppression results in her unlawful imprisonment.
Emergence : Out of the Shadows (Dir : Vinay Giridhar; 79.58 min; Documentary; Canada; Non competition)
For Kayden, Jag, and Amar, awakening to and expressing their sexuality within conservative South Asian families was a lonely and terrifying experience. Denial, shame and despair haunted their youths, even threatening their lives. Yet, they’ve emerged. In the feature documentary Emergence: Out of the Shadows, the disparate journeys of Kayden, Jag and Amar converge around a shared sense of compassion and healing as they bravely convey their often heart-wrenching stories.
27 Feb : 10.30 am to 8.30 pm; Periyar Thidal
10.30 am
Moon on the Man (Dir : Prince Shah; 75 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Moon on the Man is an observational and exploratory feature length documentary, that questions the most basic questions of reality, perception and choices. As such, it is synonymous with every individual’s struggle to find direction, some that bear an identity through the afflux of time in the ever-evolving landscape of human perspectives and also focuses on mental illness, old age and broken dreams
Bid for Bengal (Dir : Dwaipayan Banerjee & Kasturi Basu; 70.30 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
How did Hindu-nationalist politics find a foothold in West Bengal after all these decades? Using fresh and archival footage with personal family history, 'A Bid for Bengal' lays bare historical fault lines and visits the workings of frontal organisations in the Hindu-nationalist network responsible for the recent political shift in West Bengal, in between witnessing two consecutive elections trails, from 2019 to 2021. As resistance takes shape, one arrives at the immediate present marred with anxiety, yet not bereft of hope.
Keemat Chutaki Zeendagi (Dir : Shriprakash; 86 min; Documentary; India; Competition)
Driven by his quest for truth, a poet and people's leader rises against the power structure that is complex and layered, and with it ignites the spark of dignity and dissent among the people facing atrocities of the power.
The poet and people's leader- Mahendra Singh- is eventually murdered in 2005.
This film unearths the life of Com. Mahendra Singh and the subversive life ethos through two set of filmmakers, shot over 13 years, both investigating the truth of the man and the mass, who fought a brave but unequal war against the power structure.
2 pm
Ramachandra PN Retrospective
Voices of Mini Tipet (10 min)
Nirvana a spiritual liberation is the core of any form of Buddhism, but to the refugees in the many Tibet are settlement colonies in India such spiritual liberation is closely associated with their political liberation. This film zeroes in at one such colony in Mungod, Karnataka.
Makkala Panchayat (30 min)
In Coastal Karnataka, in South India, 56 Gram Panchayat’s (Village Self Governing Bodies) hold elections to the Makkala Panchavat (Children’s Self Governing Bodies), so that the children can from a pressure group to help solve developmental issues that they think are important to them and to their villages.
Gudigeri Company (24 min)
A popular professional theater troupe arrives at a busy fair in North Karnataka, South India only to find that its audience base is dwindling.
Miyar House (76 min)
The filmmaker’s 200-year-old ancestral house in a remote village of Miyar in Karnataka is being dismantled, giving him an opportunity to undertake a journey into a past that he shares not only with his extended family but also with successive generations of rural Indians. A realisation of the inevitability of a transition marks this journey, which could well be the journey of a country that has propelled itself into modernity. As plans are on for the house to be reconstructed in an open-air museum, divorced from its original context, the fossilization seems to be complete.
The Unbearable Being of Lightness (45 min)
The filmmaker goes to the University of Hyderabad to conduct a film related workshop where the students have to observe and write a structured report using the sight and sounds of a crowded place. The place selected is a shopping area at the University called the Shopcom, which was the epicenter of the struggle for social justice launched immediately after the death of a research scholar Rohit Vemula.
An Autobiography of a Project Report (44 min)
A retired Government technocrat passionately remembers his environment destroying pet projects that he had painstakingly worked out and proposed to the Government of Karnataka that aims to divert a portion of the water of the west flowing rivers of the state into the deep east, where it will be used for drinking purposes and to recharge ground water levels.
5.30 pm
Closing ceremony & prize distribution
7 pm
Screening of award winning films
Saturday, February 12, 2022
10th Chennai Film Festival. : Single Take Student Films - curated by Nilita Vachani
10th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022
21-27 February, multiple venues, Chennai
Single Take Student Films. : Curated by Nilita Vachani
1) - Seeing Sounds by Varun Sekar (2020)
Sekar follows a day in the life of Thangaraj, a visually impaired part-time school teacher who sells on Chennai's trains to make ends meet.
2) - Dream Castles by Vishruthi Girish (2021)
In this poignant short, Vishruthi Girish explores the "dream castles" of a little boy who cannot go to school but plays on the construction site where his father is a laborer.
3)- Lost in Translation by Gautham S (2021)
Gautham S wonders why key texts reflecting capitalist thinking are missing from Tamil translation.
4)- A Full Moon by Shweta Sandilya and Rhea Gupta (2020)
Sandilya and Gupta capture the excitement and dread as Olive Ridley turtle offspring are released to the sea.
5)- Masked Lives by Sayani Das (2021)
In Masked Lives college youth discuss the disaffection of covid mandates while a nonchalant cat looks on.
10th Chennai Film Festival 2022 : Shubradeep Chakravorthy Memorial Award for Best Indian Documentary
Dear friends!
We are happy to announce that Shubradeep Memorial Award for the Best Indian Documentary will be given from this year at Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2022.
The award includes a cash prize for Rs.50,000/- and a certificate.
Selection Committee : Sehjo Singh, Meera Chaudhary and Sabyasachi Banerjee
Final Jury : Swarnavel Easwaran, Smriti Nivetia and Fathima N.
We would like to thank the friends and family members of Subhradeep for giving their support.
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