NEW DELHI: Documentaries from India, Banglaesh and the United kingdom will be screened in ‘Persistence Resistance 2011: Documentary Practices in India’, to be held in London from 1 to 8 November.
Organised by the Delhi-based Magic Lantern Foundation, the Festival will start with a focus on Indian documentary practice to create a more informed ground to explore its specific histories, styles and provocations. The aim is to explore further political and aesthetic affiliations across geographical locations and disciplines, according to the Foundation.
Filmmakers like Arun Khopkar, Deepa Dhanraj, Rahul Roy, Rajula and Shah Saba Dewan, from India, Yasmine Kabir from Bangladesh, as well as UK based filmmakers John Wyver, Mairead McClean, Mao Mollona, Margaret Dickinson and Simon Chambers will feature their films. They will be joined by, and be in conversations with, Alisa Lebow, Alpa Shah, Guilia Battaglia, Laura Bear, Lotte Hoek, Lucia King, Nicole Wolf, Partha Mitter, Radha D’Souza, Ravi Vasudevan, Ros Gray, Rosie Thomas, Stephen Hughes, Stewart Motha and Ziba Mir Hosseini.
The documentaries include Something Like a War by Deepa Dhanraj, Figures of Thought by Arun Khopkar and The Other Song by Saba Dewan.
There will be interactive sessions on ‘Indian Arts on Films’, ‘Documentary as Witnessing the Judiciary’, ‘Movements of everyday political/aesthetic practice – emergencies, revolutions and the paradoxes of involvement’, ‘Dialogues in Movement, Poetry and Song’, ‘Global Migrations, Labour and Activism’, ‘Urban Dreams: Public Cultures, Sexuality and Pleasure’ among others.
According to Gargi Sen who organises this festival every year in Delhi, Persistence Resistance in London would like to widen the spectrum of conversations between those films and their audiences, between filmmakers and viewers through a series of constructed conversations between academics and practitioners. It introduces archival and very recent works that have not been shown in London previously.
The festival is a collaborative effort between Magic Lantern and five academic institutions – Goldsmiths, London School of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Westminster and Brunel University.
