Forum Expanded Exhibition

Our Daughters Shall Inherit the Wealth of Our Stories: The Imaginactivism of Yugantar Film

Collective

Director: Yugantar

Country: India

Produced by: SAVVY

Contemporary Berlin, Germany

Our Daughters Shall Inherit the Wealth of Our Stories will manifest spatially in the form of a convivial cinema appreciation, exhibition and discursive space that hosts films and people that resonate with the spirit of the collective alongside a constellation of stories, contextual information and artistic resonances. SAVVY Contemporary welcomes Yugantar’s ecology of vision by accommodating further mediations and entanglements in a programme that extends the duration of the films through other creative productions in performance, literature, theory, as well as in the reality of SAVVY’s neighbourhood and the larger professional community of Berlin. Adding these lively dimensions, the exhibition animates this complex lineage to be a source of new propositions for a collective filmmaking practice that strives towards relations based on equality across different backgrounds and perspectives. The film collective Yugantar was founded by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Bhaiya, Navroze Contractor, and Meera Rao in 1980. Between 1980 and 1983, during a time of radical political transformation in India, Yugantar created four pioneering films together with existing or ensuing women’s groups.

Retrospective Aparajito (Bengali)

Director: Satyajit Ray

Country: India

Starring: Pinaki Sen Gupta, Smaran Ghosal, Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Ramani Sen Gupta

Producer: Satyajit Ray

Produced by: Epic Productions

In the 1920s, Apu moved with his family from rural Bengal to Varanasi, where his father finds work as a priest. When the father dies, mother and son move back to their village. The young man resists pressure to become a priest like his father and instead persuades his mother to let him go to school. After graduating, he wins a scholarship to study in Kolkata. Apu works at a printing press at night to pay his expenses and begins to make friends. Meanwhile, left behind back home, his mother grows lonelier and lonelier … Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy was influenced by Italian neo-realism. In this, the second film, he puts his youthful protagonist in direct confrontation with modern-day commodities – automobiles, wristwatches, and printing presses – as well as the bustling street life of a contemporary metropolis and, particularly convincingly, his first encounter with electricity in the form of a lightbulb. It all challenges the young “unvanquished” on a functional level. At the same time, Apu’s individual coming of age and his adaptation to Western culture foreshadow the process of modernisation in Indian society that would culminate in the country’s independence.

Berlinale Series

Dahaad (Hindi) - Roar

Creators: Reema Kagti, Zoya Akhtar

Country: India

Starring: Sonakshi Sinha, Vijay Varma, Gulshan Devaiah, Sohum Shah

Producers: Kassim Jagmagia, Angad Dev Singh, Sunitha Ram

Produced by: Excel Media and Entertainment, Tiger Baby

In rural Rajasthan, women are disappearing but nobody seems to be alarmed. It is not uncommon here for women to elope with their partners when they cannot afford the traditional dowry. However, young policewoman Anjali Bhaati notices a similarity in the cases: long nightly phone calls, a boyfriend whom no one in the neighbourhood has ever seen, and no sign of life after the disappearance. With her motorbike and sunglasses, Anjali might wear the insignia of traditional macho cops but power and coolness are of no concern to her, rather truth and justice. As a member of a lower caste, obstacles only make her all the more determined: “I’ve had many doors shut in my face. But no one has managed to shut me up.”

In the captivating and subtly humorous Dahaad, Reema Kagti (creator, director) and Zoya Akhtar (creator), who both presented Gully Boy in Berlinale Special in 2019, and Ruchika Oberoi (director) tell the story of a society riven by caste and religion, and a legal system undermined by Hindu nationalism and a patriarchy in which marriage is the only accepted goal in life for women.

Berlinale Series Market Brown (Hindi)

Director: Abhinay Deo

Country: India

Starring: Karishma Kapoor, Helen, Soni Razdan, Surya Sharma, K.K. Raina

Producer: Zee Studios

Zee Studios’ Brown follows Karishma Kapoor (Rita Brown) as a detective in the Kolkata police force and recovering alcoholic investigating the murder of a young woman from a well-connected family. Directed by Abhinay Deo, the web series is based on the 2016 novel “City of Death” by Abheek Barua, adapted by Digvijay Singh, Sunayana Kumari and Mayukh Ghosh.