The Online Dalit Film Festival 2024 is a celebration of resistance, resilience, and the power of storytelling. It is a platform to amplify the voices of Dalit filmmakers who are challenging the status quo and redefining Indian cinema. For far too long, the visual narrative of Dalit lives has been dictated by an outsider’s gaze. This gaze has often perpetuated stereotypes, relegated Dalit characters to the margins, and failed to capture the richness and complexity of their experiences. We’ve seen Dalits portrayed as one-dimensional figures – the downtrodden, the villainous, or the comical sidekick. These depictions not only erase the rich diversity within the Dalit community but also reinforce the very caste prejudices the medium should strive to dismantle.
We believe that true representation comes from within. We need more Dalit directors, producers, actors, and storytellers at the helm. They are the ones who can bring authenticity and depth to the portrayal of Dalit lives, showcasing their struggles, triumphs, and the vibrant tapestry of their culture. Through screenings, Q&A sessions, and a panel discussion, the festival seeks to educate and engage audiences on themes of caste, social justice, and the Dalit experience. We hope to foster a dialogue that challenges discriminatory practices and promotes a more inclusive future in Indian cinema.
The festival kicks off on Thursday, July 4th, 2024, with a screening of The Discreet Charm of the Savarnas by Rajesh Rajamani. This film exposes the hypocrisies of the ‘upper caste’ filmmakers.
July 11th, 2024: Champaran Mutton by Ranjan Umakrishn Kumar is a film that underscores the themes of caste politics and discrimination. Yarigu Helonu Bayda by Ajay Tambe is a commentary on Brahmanical society, cultural biases, and the intricate dynamics of love, friendship, betrayal, and personal conflict.
July 18th, 2024: BR Ambedkar: Now And Then (BRANT) is a feature-length documentary film by Jyoti Nisha. Driven by Dr. Ambedkar’s philosophy, the film explores the representation and assertion of Bahujan people in contemporary India.
The festival concludes on Thursday, July 25th, 2024, with a panel discussion on the subject of Dalit or anti-caste themed films in India. We’ll be joined by distinguished scholars Harish S. Wankhede, Amit Kumar, Manju Edachira and Rajesh Rajamani to discuss the scope and limitations of such films, paving the way for a future of inclusive storytelling.
Neeraj Bunkar is a PhD Scholar at the Department of English, Linguistics, and Philosophy at Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom with a specific interest in Caste, Dalit, Rajasthani folklore, Oral History and Cinema. He is researching Rajasthan-based Hindi cinema from the Dalit standpoint. His write-up in the category of PostScript: ‘Spring Thunder: Adivasi Resistance for ‘Jal, Jangal, Jameen’’ (2022) and the Book review: ‘Subalternity at the Centre: A Young Diary Demands Radical Change’ (2024) published in the Economic and Political Weekly. He regularly contributes to platforms such as Forward Press and RoundTable India.
Alongside our current exhibition, Karuppu, join us for a free online in-conversation event between our exhibiting artist Osheen Siva with Jelena Sofronijevic, producer of EMPIRE LINES podcast and Nicole Thiara, researcher of Dalit and Adivasi literature.
Together, they will explore topics related to Osheen’s practice; their inspiration from cultural aesthetics that explore speculative futures and racial identity, including Afrofuturism. Osheen’s work uses science fiction, mythology, and religious heritage amidst their love of comic books and the vibrant soul of South India. Their artworks imagine fantastical dreamscapes, whilst reclaiming and reinventing Indian folktales and myths to imagine a decolonised future.
This event will be live streamed on YouTube, with auto generated closed captions. During the live event there will be the opportunity to ask questions.
Osheen Siva is a multidisciplinary artist from Thiruvannamalai, currently based in Goa. Through the lens of surrealism, speculative fiction and science fiction and rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage, Osheen imagines new worlds of decolonised dreamscapes, futuristic oases with mutants and monsters and narratives of queer and feminine power.
Jelena Sofronijevic is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, who makes content at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. Beyond their works in print they are the producer of EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art, and historicity, a new series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are, recorded on location in London (2022) and Tokyo (2023). Their full portfolio of work is available on their website, and social media.
Follow Jelena on Instagram – @empirelinespodcast, and on Twitter @jelsofron
Nicole Thiara is Co-Lead of Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ and its Follow-on Grant ‘On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’. She teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her area of research is Dalit, Adivasi and diasporic South Asian literature and her current research project focuses on the representation of modernity in Dalit literature.
For the third and final event from our Plants Beyond Empire series, Claire Reddleman and Sophie Fuggle will explore how plants have become aligned with human ideas about time, seasons and cycles.
Many plants have been co-opted into colonial and capitalist ways of understanding time. Reddleman and Fuggle will begin by taking up the case of the Ginkgo Biloba – often described as a ‘living fossil’ due to the fact it has remained unchanged for over 80 million years.
Drawing on Claire Reddleman’s research, and its arrival in Britain in the 18th Century, they will consider the ways in which the ginkgo has become an important presence in the British landscape. The speakers will then look at the castor bean, a very different plant, which has been used by humans for at least 24,000 years. In the late 19th century, the castor bean’s best-known product, castor oil, started to be used as a lubricant for car and aircraft engines. It enabled greater speed and fluidity, and joined fossil fuels in the service of capitalism’s quest for ever faster, ever more efficient movement. Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and others call this era the ‘plantationocene‘, to identify how capitalism, colonialism and labour have, often destructively, shaped the natural world.
Free – open to everyone.
Taking place online via YouTube.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of our Formations programme, in partnership with the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
Sophie Fuggle’s research focuses on connections between empire and ecology. She has conducted extensive field and archival work in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam looking at the legacy of France’s overseas penal colonies. Most recently she has begun to explore the colonial, cultural histories of the castor bean plant.
Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester and works on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art including her recent project ‘Ginkgos of the British Isles‘. She is a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.com / @reddlemap
Photo credit – dendrologista by Claire Reddleman. Map credit – 1725 Kaart van de provincie Utrecht, François Halma, collection of Universiteitsbibliotheek, Utrecht
Join Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding for an online talk exploring how Birmingham Botanical Gardens is working with local communities and visitors to highlight its colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Birmingham Botanical Gardens was founded in 1832, originally as a site of botanical and horticultural research and later with a greater emphasis on leisure and wellbeing.
Similar to many Botanic Gardens, its collection is linked to colonial expansion and trade. These links can be observed throughout the site, for example through the economic plants in the glass houses or the ornamental plants from China at the Wilson border, named after the ‘plant hunter’ Ernest Henry Wilson who brought plants over to the UK.
Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding will look at how the garden is working with local communities and visitors to highlight some of these colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Free – open to everyone.
Taking place online via YouTube.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of our Formations programme, in partnership with the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
Katharina Massing is a museum and heritage expert interested in holistic approaches to the safeguarding of landscape and traditional knowledge and sustainable heritage practices. She teaches and researches on ways museums can engage with and communicate anthropogenic changes. At the moment she is involved in a project between Nottingham Trent University and Birmingham Botanical Gardens that investigates diversifying ways in which plant stories are told.
Jen Ridding is currently the Head of Engagement & Learning at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. A dynamic cultural leader, Jen is experienced in strategic development of Learning, Audience Development, Engagement and Visitor Services. Skilled in bringing people, stories and ideas together, Jen has a successful track record in designing innovative engagement strategies across a range of arts, heritage and culture settings.
Photo credit: Birmingham Botanical Garden (2024). Photo courtesy of Katharina Massing
Join artist Rebecca Beinart for a free online talk where she will share stories and work-in-progress from her long term research into plant-human relationships, medicine and porous bodies.
During this talk she will share a short film made in collaboration with Usha Mahenthiralingam and Freddy Griffiths. The work explores the Island site in Nottingham – that once housed the Boots pharmaceutical factories and is currently under redevelopment – and spills out into histories of plant medicine, land, bioprospecting, pharmaceutical production, and thinking with plants and fungi.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme, in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
**No audio between 04:36 and 07:46, presenter repeats the start of her talk after the screening of the film later in the event. At 22:42 the speaker cut out, which has been cut from the video. This causes a small pause that lasts 6 seconds**
Rebecca Beinart is an artist, educator and curator, based in Nottingham. She develops research-based, collaborative and site-based projects that evolve through long-term engagement with places and people. She makes sculpture, installation and performance, and uses live engagement and public dialogue to reflect on collective histories and futures, social and environmental justice, knowledge-making, and the politics of public space.
Photo credit: Film Stills, Freddy Griffiths. Courtesy Rebecca Beinart.
Alongside our current exhibition, history is a living weapon in yr hand, join us for a free online In-conversation event between our current exhibitor Onyeka Igwe and Dr. Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at NTU.
Together, they will explore topics related to Igwe’s wider practice and the ideas, research and development that informs both the exhibition and Igwe’s 2023 film, A Radical Duet, that is central to the installation.
On the evening there will be the opportunity to pose questions.
Jenni Ramone is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at NTU, where she directs the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. She is also managing editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her forthcoming book is Global Literature and Gender: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, and recent books include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, and The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing. Her current project is on breastfeeding in literature and art.
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born and based moving image artist and researcher.
Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.
She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
Coinciding with The Art Schools of the East Midlands exhibition, join us for a free event that explores the role of British art schools in shaping fashion, music and club culture over the last 40-50 years.
We will be joined by esteemed writer and curator Paul Gorman, who will discuss his work’s engagement with the significant role played by art schools, their educators and attendees in the broader culture.
Join us as we explore this past and consider it against the wider influence of the notion of the ‘art school’ on other forms of cultural and creative production.
Paul Gorman is a writer, curator and commentator on visual culture. His Books include The Look: Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion, Mr Freedom – Tommy Roberts: British Design Hero, The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren and The Wild World of Barney Bubbles. The paperback of his latest book, Totally Wired: The Rise & Fall of the Music Press was published in summer 2023.
Gorman has written for many of the world’s leading publications and curated exhibitions in the UK, continental Europe and the US.
Photo of Paul Gorman by Toby Amies.
Join us for a free, online talk between Irene Lusztig and Patricia Francis – part of the When I Dare to be Powerful conference.
Free and online via YouTube.
Patricia Francis and filmmaker Irene Lusztig will explore and discuss the value of archive in bringing voices and their subjective truths from the past into the present. Irene will also show extracts from a couple of her films including her latest release, Richland.
This is the final in the series of online talks and podcast conversations we have been having as part of the When I Dare To Be Powerful in-person international conference.
Bio:
Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, visual artist, archival researcher, and amateur seamstress. Her film and video work mines old images and technologies for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, and reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of Irene’s current work is centred on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001) the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013) and the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011).
Born in England to Romanian parents, Irene grew up in Boston and has lived in France, Italy, Romania, China, and Russia. Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, RIDM Montréal, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and BFI London Film Festival and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She is the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media; she lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Discussing the relationship between social activism and research, Dr Asma Sayed will tell us more about her ongoing research.
Join us for a conversation with Dr. Asma Sayed, Canada Research Chair in South Asian Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) in Canada, and NTU PhD candidate Ramisha Rafique.
They will discuss how the academic space can play an important role in working towards equity and inclusion and fostering a just society through anti-racism and Islamophobia awareness initiatives. Discussing the relationship between social activism and research, Dr Asma Sayed will tell us more about her ongoing research, activist work, and anti-racism initiatives at KPU.
Free – online via YouTube.
Taking part as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre.
Bios:
Dr. Asma Sayed
Dr. Asma Sayed is Associate Vice President (interim) for anti-racism, professor of English, and Canada Research Chair in South Asian Literary and Cultural Studies at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2020. She is the past President of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies. Her interdisciplinary research is informed by feminist and critical race studies and focuses on marginalization of gendered and racialized people as represented in literature, film, and media. Her current project examines the contributions of South Asian writers and filmmakers in Canada to the discourse of social justice. Her publications include five books and numerous articles in academic journals, anthologies, and periodicals.
Ramisha Rafique
Ramisha Rafique is a NTU PhD studentship funded PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University. Her creative-critical doctoral thesis explores the ontology of the postcolonial flâneuse, considering, class, language, religion, and global technological advancements. Her research interests include Islamophobia, British Muslim women’s writing, and flânerie.
Join Dr Tracey Lindberg in conversation with Valentina de Riso, as part of the When I Dare to be Powerful conference at Bonington Gallery.
Valentina de Riso will be in conversation with Dr Tracey Lindberg on Indigenous voice in literature. This online talk will explore writing as a form of activist engagement, with fiction a site of resistance and a tool for empowerment. Tracey Lindberg will discuss voice as represented and mobilised in her novel Birdie, and the personal and collective implications of storytelling at the intersection with activist and academic work.
This event is part of online talks series leading to the in-person conference When I Dare to be Powerful, on 21 June at Bonington Gallery. The international conference will bring filmmakers, artists, writers and activists, together with conceptual thinkers and cultural theorists in order to answer pressing questions relating to voice as an agent of change.
Image credit: David Weatherall
Bio:
Professor Tracey Lindberg hails from the As’in’î’wa’chî Ni’yaw (Kelly Lake Cree Nation) and grew up in small cities and towns in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan (including, Melfort, Nipawin and Prince Albert). She studied law at the University of Saskatchewan, Harvard Law School (LLM) and the University of Ottawa (PhD). Her academic work Critical Indigenous Legal Theory won the University of Ottawa’s Gold Medal and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award.
Tracey Lindberg’s work with Elder Maria Campbell and Priscilla Campeau “Indigenous Women and Sexual Assault in Canada” (in Elizabeth Sheehy ed. Ch. 5, Indigenous Women and Sexual Assault in Canada (Ottawa: U Ottawa, 2017) represents the legal thinking and pedagogy in which she is most interested and engaged and includes engagement with Cree laws, critical Indigenous legal theory and storytelling. Her best-selling novel Birdie is widely read and used to teach courses worldwide.
Professor Lindberg studies, reads and practices Niyaw / Cree law, and works in the areas of Indigenous law and literature, Indigenous legal theory, the rejuvenation and application of Indigenous laws and Indigenous women’s societies, laws and legal orders.
Her next work will be on bookshelves this fall. It is called: sâkihitowin: the Cree word for love and features 16 intertwined stories about the spectrum of love tied to 20 pieces of art by Cree painter George Littlechild.
Tracey currently teaches at the University of Victoria faculty of law.
Valentina de Riso (she/her) is a Vice Chancellor’s Studentship PhD student at Nottingham Trent University. Her research focuses on contemporary writings by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women who challenge and re-think models for testimony and Indigenous-settler relations in Canada. Her thesis examines motifs of mutual understanding, healing, forgiveness, and empathy which, when employed in national discourses of reconciliation risk naturalising, pathologising, or sensationalising Indigenous experiences of violence and trauma. They are re-imagined in Indigenous women’s productions. Valentina published her article ‘Spin the Tale Inside: Opacity and Respectful Distance in Lee Maracle’s Celia’s Song’ in the academic journal Studies in Canadian Literature (SCL) in 2021.
