Film

Kisan Mukti Yatra

The above video is a documentation of the day that the Kisan Mukti Yatra spent with Medha Patkar and the people of Narmada Bachao Andolan during its’ travel throughout North India addressing and mobilising farmers. More information here – The Quint.

Tamil Nadu Drought Yatra

Travelled with the yatra, documenting via film, drought affected areas in Tamil Nadu that was witnessing its’ worst drought of 140 years. You can read about the experience here in an article by Yogendra Yadav: In Parched Land in The Tribune.

Do Nothing: A Film on Zero Budget Natural Farming

This documentary was made to showcase what it meant to practice zero budget natural farming. It has been screened at various workshops being attended in the thousands by farmers opting out of chemical farming because of heavy losses and subsequent debts.

Film documenting the Youth Camp for young farmers, KRRS.

The youth camp organised by Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha was a first attempt by the leadership of the nearly 35 year old organisation to attend to the needs and concerns of young farmers in a rapidly changing agricultural system.

Fundraiser Video for KRRS Activist, JM Veerasangaiah

This video was made as part of a fundraising effort for the activist JM Veerasangaiah from Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha who underwent kidney transplant after his kidneys were injured during a protest action. More information on the fundraiser page at Milaap.

Kaveri (2011)

Kaveri is a Kannada short film that follows the story of it’s protagonist, a 13 year old girl as she negotiates what it might mean to become a woman. Engulfed by the vastness of the adult world, Kaveri searches for the gesture that provides hope.
Directed by Shilpa Munikempanna
Produced by Rashmi Munikempanna

Awards

Best Short Fiction Award. 4th International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. India. 2011.
Best Asian Short 23rd Edition of Aguilar Short Film Festival, Spain, December 2011

You Went Back Again and Again. 2009.

The video You Went Back Again and Again, 2009 addresses the space of mourning and does this by looking at the registers of memory. The camera traverses with me to spaces that repeatedly explode with images I want to erase. A video installation the work is an assemblage of images, text, sounds. Set within the overall narrative of a car journey to my father’s grave and back, the work seeks to document the two years after the event. Believing strongly in a certain image of grieving this work sets out for me and the viewer an alternative. Conversations traverse from the incredulous to deep feelings of guilt, images from journeys explore the space of being nowhere and the self writes itself in words that cannot be strung together. Bodies don’t exist in these spaces whole, neither of those who have passed nor of those who live to tell, to mourn. It testifies to what is left, the images, the knowing, the ifs and the buts.

What I Wish I Could Say. 2009.

What I Wish I Could Say, 2009 is a video installation. Made to be seen in a completely dark space with the only light being that of the projector, it approximates the solitude of reading, the solitude of reflexivity “..in cinema, something has passed..” says Roland Barthes. The viewer is invited to watch as words appear and disappear from the wall, each sentence, each utterance undone by the next. Using Jean Hippolyte’s understanding of Freud’s term ‘Verneinung’ as ‘the mode of presenting what one is in the mode of not being it.’ the film’s text points to what is not being said. The work alternates between telling the viewer what I wished could have been different and what I wish I could have the courage to tell. It leaves open questions concerning the facts of the event, which are difficult to write let alone speak and yet in that space of not telling, the telling gets done. I have said what I want to say but I will never know what you heard, what you saw.

What I Wish I could Say, 2009 and You Went Back Again and Again, 2009 were made as a direct response to losing my father. Being unable to grieve or thinking that I was not grieving and having the event of his passing becoming unspeakable, making this work has been a way of attesting to a witnessing, a way of grieving, a way of stating and making real that this did happen, ‘this-has-been’. A testimonial is written after the fact. So how will this testimony without any photographs be framed, be written and in the language of the image? My work being intensely personal still finds itself engaging within the more public domains of dialogue currently happening within the world around end of life choices. Words, spoken or written is an integral part of the work. It is complicated by the understanding that language is something that only approximates.