Early Career Fellowship

The Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences announces a fellowship for film-makers at an early stage of their career. The fellowship is designed to provide the resources and environment for films that are innovative, relevant and contribute to the growing body of documentary and short film work in India.

 

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The film deals with the issues of displacement of the farming community and the impact on their health and livelihoods due to the Jindal Power Plant in Chattisgarh.

Cinema can help you better your life, film stars can give you moral and spiritual messages which can uplift you. Sagai believes this. Sagai is a film buff and his idol is South Indian Superstar Rajnikant. He grew up watching films in a semi legal video theater in the Mumbai slums. When he came of age he started working in the same place, as did his father before him. The video theatre now no longer exists. In an eloquent and often politically incorrect streetspeak, Sagai tells us the story of his video theater alongside his trip with films.

In October 2007, a group of people from PERCH, a Chennai based theatre collective, traveled to Kozhikkode, Kerala, to rediscover the world of the Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. The people we met, and the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds of Kozhikkode were the source of inspiration for two plays in English based on several of Basheer's stories. Many of Basheer's stories reveal something of the writer himself - his incredible humanity, his experiences of love and poverty, his criticism of politics and war, his eclectic taste in music, his love of nature, and his radical beliefs about the society around him. 'My Name is Basheer' is a film that weaves scenes from the two plays – 'Sangathi Arinhya! (Have you Heard!)' and 'Moonshine & Skytoffee' – with interviews of his family and others who knew him closely. Sharing their memories of Basheer are, his brother Abu Backer, wife Fabi, children Anees and Shahina, M.K Sanu who was Basheer's biographer, Punalur Rajan who photographed Basheer over several years, and M.A Rahman who made the award-winning documentary 'Basheer the Man'. About the Director Anushka Meenakshi started off studying Mathematics, but found her way into making films. Her work mostly involves documenting true stories, but she loves to read, watch, and listen to stories of every kind. In 2006, she co-directed 'c/o Platform', a film about pavement dwellers, which was produced by the Public Service Broadcast Trust. She has also worked as a community video trainer for Nalamdana, an NGO in Chennai. Anushka is a member of PERCH, a performance collective in Chennai. anushka.meenakshi@gmail.com

This film inquires into the boom of banner production and display and the politics of claiming spaces through interviews, fictional and graphical sequences.