11th Social Justice Film Festival 2022
14-17 April, Periyar Thidal, Chennai
Jointly organised by MARUPAKKAM and Periyar Self Respect Media
Some Moments!
Screening Schedule
14th April, 5.30 pm
Mannu : Sprouts of Endurance
Dir : Ramdas Kadavallur; 1 hour 53 min; India
The Plantation strike led by the women tea plantation workers in Munnar, Kerala was a nine day strike, which further lead to the formation of Pempilai Orumai (women's unity) , a landmark movement in the labour union history of India. The strike has broke out on 2015, Sept 5 with around 5000 workers started their agitation in front of Kannan Devan Hills Plantations Ltd. Office, when management decided to scale down the bonus to 10 percent from 20 percent. The strike was a female labour movement first time in the history of India and was an attempt to demarcate the economical and gender disparities in plantation sector.
15th April (11 am to 8 pm)
11 am
Into Dust
Dir : Orlando von Einsiedel; 40 min; United Kingdom / Pakistan
When Perween Rahman is murdered, her sister Aquila returns to Karachi, Pakistan to investigate. Finding herself caught up in powerful forces stealing the city’s water, her sister exposed the impact of corruption. Based on a true story of one activist who worked tirelessly to protect the rights of Pakistan’s poor.
We are not together
Dir : Alexander Nezam; 64 min; United States / Greece
An aspiring math professor from Palestine, a once-imprisoned political activist from Iran, a young entrepreneur from Syria. These people are among the tens of thousands trapped in Greece after the closing of the European borders. Greeks, international volunteers, and refugees alike now struggle to find meaning and community in the birthplace of democracy, a country with a continued history of political turmoil. With moments ranging from the horrific to the sublime, We Are Not Together reminds us that the experience of the "refugee" defies easy definition.
2 pm
How Do Animals and Plants Live?
Dir : Sherry Millner, Ernest Larsen; 26.56 min; United States / Greece
Is it true that translation creates the basis for a new commons? If so, how?
The video essay How Do Animals and Plants Live? is an inquiry into the forcible eviction and immediate demolition of the self-organized anarchist-supported migrant squat Orfanotrofeio in Thessaloniki, Greece, in July 2016.
Profiles
Dir : Kathleen Foster; 53 min; United States
Some of the victims—Eric Garner, Michael Brown—are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods. Profiled knits the stories of mothers of black and Latin youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S.
Resisters
Dir : Jill Daniels; 60 min; United Kingdom / Germany
Framed through a letter to the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg Resisters celebrates 100 years of resistance to fascism. Taking a two-fold journey through Berlin, a geographical one and a psychic one to bring the past into the present, Daniels reflects on Berlin's turbulent history and the present growth of the nationalist AfD who became the main opposition party in Germany in 2017.
5.30 pm
Ye Lo Bayan Humaare, And We Were There 1967 -77
Dir : Uma Chakravarthi, Priyanka Chhabra (Co -Direction); India
Part 1 : 60 min
Part 2 : 82 min
Yeh Lo Bayaan Humaare is a film about the idealism, passion and the jail time of young women coming of age in the late 1960s, seeking to change the world, and throwing themselves into movements sweeping parts of India. Hounded for their activities, tortured by the police and incarcerated in jails, these women found a camaraderie that went beyond revolutionary ideology that had inspired them. As the late sixties gave way to the seventies, the Emergency was imposed across India, and the number of women who went to jail for their political idealism expanded to many cities, small towns, and villages across the country.
16 April
11 am
Did You Do It?
Dir : Aditi Bhande; 24 min; India
A place that is neither urban nor rural, on the fringes of the capital of India. The film attempts to explore the dynamics between natural resources and human intervention in this place that is my home. Who is responsible- they, you, me- all of us?
Ultraviolence
Dir : Ken Fero; 75 min; United Kingdom
The silence over the police killings of Black people is now broken. Since 1969, over two thousand people have died at the hands of the police in the UK. Shootings, chokeholds, batons, gassing, suffocation, restraint and brutal beatings are some of the methods used. The numbers of deaths is escalating. Inevitably police officers involved are not convicted for these killings.
2 pm
Bound By Us
Dir : Chinmoy Sonowal; 20 min; India
An exploration of the life of a shrinking forest that finds itself confined within the city of New Delhi, the film looks at direct and indirect impacts of human intervention.
Boramey - Ghosts in the Factory
Dir: Tammaso Facchin, Ivan Franceschini; 60 min; Italy / Cambodia
Sreyra, Ponler, and Sreyven are three young garment workers in Cambodia. Day after day, they produce clothes for the most important global brands, until something exceptional disrupts their routine: suddenly they pass out in the workplace, an event that is followed by their colleagues fainting en masse. Episodes of mass fainting like these are not uncommon in Cambodia, where labour conditions remain harsh.
Right Now I Want to Scream : Police and Army Killings in Rio - the Brazil Haiti Connection
Dir : Cahal McLaughlin & Siobhan Wills; 62 min; United Kingdom / Brazil
The film was produced using participatory practices in collaboration with mothers whose children have been killed during police operations in Complexo do Alemão, Manguihos, Complexo de Maré; and Salgueira.
5 .30 pm
Jamnapar
Dir : Abhinava Bhattacharya; 24 min; India
Jamnapaar lurks on the river's edge seeking to explore how the inhabitants of the Jamuna relate to its degraded presence, the fragile nostalgia of an unknowable past and the horror of its unthinkable future.
Many Straws Make A Nest
Dir : Johanna Schellhagen; 50 min; Germany / India
In the last 30 years, the Delhi region has turned into one of the world's major industrial hubs. The required workforce is recruited from India's poorer regions, where survival is being made more and more difficult for the rural populace. This is why 4.5 million industrial workers in Southern Delhi are willing to ruin their health for wages their families can hardly survive on.
17 April
11 am
Flying While Fat
Dir : Stacy Bias; 6.13 min; United Kingdom; Animation
Flying is uncomfortable for many people, but when the physical infrastructure of the plane doesn’t accommodate your body and/or the social attitudes of other passengers make the plane environment a hostile space, flying can be a particularly anxious thing to do. News stories about fat passengers often present them as unreasonably taking up space that is not their own, as a problem for others, dehumanising fat people akin to ‘excess baggage’.
Light in Stones
Dir : Iqbal Barkat; 6.20 min; Australia / India
The imagined contemplations of a Muslim pilgrim in contemporary India. This cine-poem follows their steps and sees their thoughts through verse on-screen. Using travel footage of everyday scenes in India, Light In Stones, traverses the fears, joys, trepidations and hopes of the pilgrim.
The Icon and the Iconoclast
Dir : Vilasini Ramani; 18.47 min; India
This period short film is based on a conversation that reportedly happened between Periyar E.V. Ramasamy and Mahatma Gandhi in the year 1927. Over this conversation, Periyar, a rationalist anti-caste leader from South India and the key figure of the Dravidian Movement, and Mahatma Gandhi, the well-known pacifist leader of the Indian Independence Movement, discuss their views on religion.
Stains
Dir : Rhea Mathews; 30 min; India
Stains’ is a Short Fiction based on Manjula Padmanabhan's short story of the same name.
The film revolves around a couple from diverse cultural backgrounds, who are spending a weekend with the man’s mother for Onam. During the visit, the woman starts menstruating and stains her bedsheets. Her boyfriend's mother’s extreme reaction to the event, his failure to stand up for her and in turn expecting her to adjust, results in a fraught environment.
2 pm
Social Justice through Poetry : Reciting and Interaction with Poets
5 pm
A Mandolin in Exile
Dir : Rafiqul Anwar; 57 min; Bangladesh
Modhurchora Refugee Camp, at Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, the largest of its kind in the world, where millions of Rohingya refugees are confined. In this land of no-hope, filled with extreme despair of existential struggle, rays of hope are being ignited by a lone native musician. Mohammad (Ahmed) Hossain, the ‘Mandolin man’ refuged here along with millions of Rohingyas out of fear, threat and massacre instituted by Myanmar military force since August, 2017.
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