YCAR is pleased to support the South Asian Film Festival 2021—“Stories of, by and from South Asia”
This FREE, virtual Film Festival is aimed at amplifying South Asian culture and activism to create meaningful dialogues and intercultural awareness. We see these films as important resources for students, researchers, faculties and general film enthusiasts to learn more about South Asia and its diaspora.
2 April
Facing the Dragon
Afghanistan/United States | 2018 | 82 mins
by Sedika Mojadidi
In this intimate documentary, Afghan-American filmmaker SedikaMojadidi follows two extraordinary Afghan women, a politician and a journalist, to examine what is happening to women as American troops and international aid pull out of Afghanistan. Through Sedika’s perspective, we see how women on the front lines struggle to keep their rights and their families safe in a country where lawlessness and violence are only increasing.
9 April
And What is the Summer Saying
India | 2018 | 23 mins
by Payal Kapadia
A mystical film-poem on Kondwalli village in Maharashtra.
Namdeo has learnt to live off the forest from his father. He scours the treetops, searching for honey. The wind blows and afternoon descends on the small village by the jungle. Women of the village whisper little secrets of their lost loves. A strange smoke emits from the ground. A mystical film poem about Kondwalli, its inhabitants and surrounding forest.
Scratches on Stone
India | 2018 | 66 mins
by Amit Mahanti
There has been a ceasefire in Nagaland since 1997 after an almost 50-year war.
between the Indian Government and groups fighting for independence. In Chenwetnyu, near the Nagaland-Myanmar border, 98-year old Cheno Khuzuthrupa remembers the war through a wooden engraving outside his house. And in neighbouring Wakching, Zubeni and Shoupa talk about an Austrian ethnologist’s photography in the area from the 1930s. In Nagaland, the past lingers, framed through photographs, casting shadows over the present.
16 April
We Have Not Come Here to Die
India | 2019 | 78 mins
by Deepa Dhanraj
On 17 January 2016, PhD research scholar and Dalit activist Rohith Vemula committed suicide, unable to bear persecution from a partisan university administration and caste supremacists. His suicide note, which argued against the “value of a man being reduced to his immediate identity” galvanised student politics in India. Over the following year thousands of students all over broke the silence around their experiences of caste discrimination in educational institutions and have started a powerful anti-caste movement. The film tracks this movement that is changing the conversation on caste in India.
23 April
An Engineered Dream
India | 2018 | 72 mins
by Hemant Gaba
Kota city in Rajasthan attracts 200,000 teenaged students a year from all over India, who come to attend coaching schools that help them prepare for undergraduate competitive exams of prestigious colleges. The students stay in cramped quarters and study more than 15 hours a day for two years for entrance exams that have an acceptance rate of less than one percent. The film tracks the intense pressure the students face from the coaching institutes, peers and families.
30 April
Bamboo Stories
Bangladesh | 2019 | 96 mins
by Shaheen Dill-Riaz
It is midsummer in northeastern Bangladesh. Five men face a dangerous mission. They must conquer the great river with their raft. Their journey will last a month and take them 300 kilometers downstream. Their cargo: 25,000 bamboo logs, which they have to deliver despite endless heat, pouring rain, dangerous rapids, and river pirates who lurk in the dark.
Click Here To Know More Details About the Films:
https://www.filmsouthasia.org/tfsa-2020/tfsa-20-package/
For further information, contact Anushray Singh (Juice editor and co-ordinator,
South Asian Documentary Film Festival 2021) at community@juicedroplet.com
Follow Juicedroplet on Instagram to stay up-to-date with the festival:
instagram.com/juicedroplet
This festival will be screening movies from Film Southasia’s 2020 Package and is facilitated by Juice in co-sponsorship with the University of Windsor: Communication, Media and Film & Women’s and Gender Studies; Ryerson University’s Critical Diasporic South Asian Feminism Project; and the York Centre for Asian Research.
