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- Convenors:
-
Juergen Schaflechner
(Freie University Berlin)
Max Kramer (Freie Universität Berlin)
- Location:
- Room 308
- Start time:
- 29 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 4
Short Abstract:
This panel aims at bringing together academic filmmakers working on South Asia to present and discuss their work in the light of the emergent interest in political aesthetics of the digital documentary.
Long Abstract:
Documentary filmmaking has increasingly become an important way of expression for many scholars on South Asia. Not merely the simplified means to produce short documentaries, but also the need to disseminate knowledge outside of academia have led to a proliferation of documentaries on religion and social movements in South Asia. Three questions strike us as particularly important: How can we think about the intersection of aesthetics and scholarly practice? How do we mediate academic knowledge through the emergent forms of digital documentary? How do we negotiate between presentative strategies and the politics of representation?
In this panel we aim to portray a few short documentary films followed by discussions with directors, editors, and producers. With this panel we hope to contribute to the raising interest in political aesthetics of filmmaking in recent years with a regional focus on South Asia.
Films should not be longer than 25 minutes and should only be submitted if the filmmaker will also be present at the conference.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Juergen Schaflechner (Freie University Berlin) Sarah Ewald (University of Heidelberg)
Paper short abstract:
Following the work of Sanjesh, Ravi, and Rita, three volunteers at the Pakistan Seva Trust (a Hindu NGO in the Islamic Republic) the film reveals the complexities behind forced conversions in today’s Pakistan and seeks to disentangle them from a simply religious movens.
Paper long abstract:
Cases of “forced conversion” of Hindu girls in Pakistan often have a similar trajectory: a young woman disappears from her house, or place of work, for some days and resurfaces again as a married and newly converted Muslim. Changing one’s religion from Islam to any other faith would mean a denial of the Prophet Mohammad, thus this apostasy in Pakistan is an illegal act under blasphemy laws (§295 Pakistan Penal Code). Once a conversion occurs and has been publicized, the combination of legal issues and the dominant street power of extremist religious groups make it impossible for the newly converted girl to go back to her former life. Thus the acceptance of Islam in Pakistan is unidirectional. Unfortunately, these conversions are often utilized to conceal criminal acts including kidnapping, human trafficking, and rape. These cases also carry implications of “patriarchal opportunism” (Toor 2011), whereby religious sentiments are manipulated as a means of controlling female sexuality and denying women’s autonomy in choosing a spouse. Following the work of Sanjesh, Ravi, and Rita, three volunteers at the Pakistan Seva Trust (a Hindu NGO in the Islamic Republic) the film reveals the complexities behind forced conversions in today’s Pakistan and seeks to disentangle them from a simply religious movens.
DISCUSSION ON Thrust In To Heaven 20 min.
Fathima Nizaruddin (University of Westminster, London)
Paper short abstract:
I will screen 'Nuclear Hallucinations', which is part of my practice-based PhD project. The project explores the role of modes of comedy in destabilizing authoritarian knowledge claims in documentary.The screening will be followed by an elaboration about the formation of the processes of the film.
Paper long abstract:
In contemporary India, various people's movements contest the legitimacy of the nuclear project of the Indian state. However the narrative of "nuclear nationalism" (Bidwai &Vanaik, 2000) refuses to tolerate such contestations and very often anti-nuclear activists and protestors are labelled as 'anti-nationals'. This makes them worthy targets for state violence and the epistemological violence, which delimits the permissible 'facts' around the nuclear, has an intrinsic connection to this state violence. Pro-nuclear documentary films by state institutions like Films Division and Vigyan Prasar can be viewed as constituents in this epistemological violence. Using this context, my practice-based research project 'Nuclear Hallucinations' explores the possibility of destabilizing the authoritarian knowledge claims around the Indian nuclear project using modes of comedy. Through a film, which claims the name of documentary and performances around it, the project raises questions about the epistephilic dimensions of documentary as well as the impulses that prompt a film to label itself as a documentary. Theoretical framework of the project relies on the concept of relational reality from Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism and Rancière's (2010) idea of dissensus.
Bidwai, P., & Vanaik, A. (2000). New Nukes: India, Pakistan and global nuclear
disarmament. New York: Interlink Books.
Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus : On politics and aesthetics. (S. Corcoran, Ed., & S.
Corcoran, Trans.) London ; New York: Continuum.
Iffat Fatima
Paper short abstract:
The film enters the vexed political scenario in Indian Controlled Kashmir through the lives of families of the victims of enforced disappearances. A non-sequential account of personal narratives and reminiscences it seeks to confront advocates of amnesia in Kashmir as well as in other conflict zones.
Paper long abstract:
The conflict in Kashmir is among the long-standing political conflicts in the world. It has taken a heavy toll on lives, on sanity and on the idea of normality. While it has turned the Indian state coarse and brutal, it has turned the local population, recipients of several decades of unrelenting violence, defiant and angry. The film Khoon Diy Baarav made over 9 years explores memory as a mode of resistance, constantly confronting reality and morphing from the personal to the political, the individual to the collective. A non-sequential account of personal narratives and reminiscences ruptured by violence, undermined by erasure and over-ridden by official documents that challenge truth, it questions the militaristic approach to resolve political problems, by which communities and lives within it get invaded and destroyed, even as it shatters personal dreams and desires. The film appeals for a political resolution to the Kashmir issue, which has by now affected five generations of people in the region.
Uzma Falak Mehraj (AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia) Sarah Ewald (University of Heidelberg)
Paper short abstract:
The film attempts to challenge dominant narratives of victimhood of women in Indian-controlled Kashmir and resist the ‘official’ cultural producers’ exoticised iconography.
Paper long abstract:
The film attempts to challenge the dominant narratives of victimhood of Kashmir women by bringing to fore their stories of resistance and spaces contextualising their experiences.
Using intergenerational narratives, personal histories, archival photos, poetry, songs and images, the film sets out to challenge the dominant images of representation and exoticised iconography reinforced by Bollywood and attempts to explore myriad forms of resistance employed by the Kashmir women in their day-to-day lives; witnessing, grieving, praying, celebrating, walking, dreaming—the film endows each act with deep political meanings.
Interweaving memory into physical spaces renders spaces into characters. The filmic narrative is strung together with filmmaker's poems through which she explores her memory and embeds herself in the film, punctuating the inter-generational women's narratives.
The act of remembering against the institutionalised amnesia is a recurring motif in the film, resisting hegemonic narratives by the exploration of 'counter-memory'.
Through a confluence of academic discourse and documentary practice, the film seeks to explore possibilities of excavation of 'subjugated knowledges' by bringing to fore perspectives that hegemonic practices have foreclosed, thus not only aiming to explore counter-histories but raising questions on the practice, process and form itself.
Nausheen Ishtiaq
Paper short abstract:
7000 Miles is a film project about everyday life in two cities 7000 miles apart, as lived and experienced by 20 people from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. The film aims to de-mystify and de-exoticise the “other” by opening a window into everyday life in both cities.
Paper long abstract:
7000 Miles is a film about everyday life in two cities that are geographically 7000 miles apart, as lived and experienced by ten people from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds and walks of life. The film discovers parallels of urban existence between those inhabiting vastly different geographies. The participants live in Karachi and New York City - two large metropolitan cities in two countries with very different levels of development, culture and socioeconomics: Pakistan and USA.
"There (is) a power concealed in everyday life's apparent banality, a depth beneath its triviality, something extraordinary in its very ordinariness"(1). The film strips every day life down to its most simple moments: struggling with washing the dishes, avoiding eye contact in crowded public spaces, frowning at an unruly student in class. It is hoped that the exploration of the seemingly mundane activities of daily life in both cities will help break down the perceived differences between the two cultures and ways of living. The inclusion of the inner "demons" that each subject mulls over during the course of a day is aimed at developing a deeper understanding of the subjects, by enabling the audience to discover the subjects through their innermost fears, ambitions, motivations and ruminations.
(1) Lefebvre, Henri, and Sacha Rabinovitch. Everyday Life in the Modern World Second Revised Edition. London: Continuum International Pub. Group, 2000. Print.