The year 2023 has been most rewarding for PARI’s film’s division - videos, documentaries, short clips and feature films on people in rural India.
As an online journal, we encourage films that take a hard look at news and events around us. Our film on Madrasa Azizia in Bihar examined the aftermath of the communally-inspired burning of a 113-year-old library in Biharsharif town of Bihar. Our film on renewable energy taking over sacred groves - orans – in Jaisalmer district challenged the categorisation of these scrub forests as ‘wasteland’ to be handed over to solar and wind energy plants.
We started the year with a lilting love song by an Adivasi buffalo herder on the Brahmaputra in Assam. Through the year we continued to add songs and dances from different parts of the country like West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Rajasthan and others.
And we are ending the year with a film on PARI’s Grindmill Songs Project – documenting the journey of this phenomenal body of work spanning decades.
This year we added an important film, Worth that brings the voices of women waste collectors in Pune who ask the question, “if you are generating waste, how are we ‘kachrewali [‘waste women’]?” And among our films on the impact of changing climate we published Alphonso mango, its growers distressed by unseasonal weather.
Through the year, we have been adding to our archive of films on communities: This film on Ugadi celebrations in Medapuram by people from the Madiga community brought alive the sound and colour of a new Dalit tradition. This long film on the struggling art of Tholpavakoothu done by different castes and communities in the Malabar region tells multi cultural stories using shadow puppetry. And from the neighbouring state of Karnataka, the life of a Nadaswaram player who is a crucial part of Bhuta worship in Tulunadu is richly detailed. The almost lost wax-casting technique to make metal figures – Dokra - is captured in this film from West Bengal.
Do watch these films!
