India Retold: Dialogues with Independent Documentary Filmmakers in India

Description

India Retold: Dialogues with Independent Documentary Filmmakers in India is an attempt to situate and historicize the engagement of independent documentary filmmakers with the postcolonial India and its discourses with a focus on their independent documentary practices. Structured as an interview collection, the book examines how these documentary filmmakers, though not a homogeneous category, practice their independence through their ideology, their filmmaking praxis, their engagement with the everyday and their formal experiments. As a sparsely studied filmmakers, the book through meticulously tracing a wide ranging historical transitions (often marked by communal conflicts and the forces of globalization) not only details the ways in which independent filmmakers in India address the questions of postcolonial nation and its modernist projects but also explores their idiosyncratic views of these filmmakers which are characterized by a definitive departure from the logic of commercial films or state-sponsored documentary films. More important in many ways, these documentary filmmakers expose incongruences in national institutions and programs, embrace the voice of the underrepresented, and thus, imagine an alternative vision of the nation. During the last three years of the execution of the project, thirty Indian documentary filmmakers are interviewed in this book. Given the dearth of quality interviews and little theoretical engagement with documentary as a genre, this book would not only fill in the gap in scholarship but also would serve as an authentic guide for interested readers and for documentary filmmakers alike.

Rajesh James is an independent documentary filmmaker and an Assistant Professor of English at Sacred Heart College, Kochi, India. His major documentary films include In Thunder, Lightning and Rain (2019) Naked Wheels (2017) and Zebra Lines (2014). Shaped by the conventions of cinema verite and ethnography, his key thematic concerns are gender, caste and, subalternity as refracted through the prism of labour. He was awarded Riyad Wadia Award for the Best Emerging Filmmaker, India in 2017. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He is the author of nine books and over hundred research publications that span African American literature, health humanities, graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and cultural studies disciplines. He is most recently co-editor of Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation (Singapore: Springer, 2022).

India Retold more than lives up to its title. The interviews with thirty politically committed independent filmmakers tell the inspiring history of an alternative filmmaking practice, detached from institutional funding and benefitting, over the years, from increasingly de-professionalised technologies. The films discussed cover a disturbing and equally alternative history of India, stretching from the 1970s' Emergency years to 2020. The filmmakers' stories make fascinating and compelling reading. * Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film Studies, University of London, UK * An exciting and original intervention in the field of South Asian film studies that is currently fixated on Bollywood and its global reach. Through interviews with some extraordinary and paradigm shifting independent filmmakers, the reader is given a sense of a landscape that resists cliche, social conservatism, and the pressures of political conformity. It gives voice to those that speak courageously for the suppressed minorities of India. * Dilip Menon, Professor of History and Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa * This is an exciting, comprehensive and pathbreaking compendium focusing fully on the independent documentary sector in Indian cinema. The formidable collection of in-depth interviews with a diverse and eminent range of filmmakers is accompanied by an uninhibited and candid approach to appraising state-sanctioned ethno-religious turbulence, caste-based discrimination, queer identities and the rising tide of right-wing populist politics in India - facets that make this book both timely and essential. * Ashvin Devasundaram, Senior Lecturer in World Cinema, Queen Mary University of London, UK * India Retold: Dialogues with Independent Documentary Filmmakers in India is an in-depth approach to independent filmmaking in India. With historical and sociopolitical analysis, the book gives us an overview not only about filmmaking, but India's culture of the last century. I could highlight the gender and sexuality part of the book that really gives a new perspective to the matter. A must read for the filmmaker and researcher but also for the audience that wants to immerse in this sub continent's hidden history. * Gina Petropoulou, Artistic Director, Peloponnisos International Documentary Festival *