View From The Margins

By Sangeetha Devi Dundoo

Passing by Film-maker Kavita Joshi's images of Manipur disturb and engage viewers

In focus Documentary film-maker Kavita Joshi

Manipur is no strange land for documentary film-maker Kavita Joshi. Though based in Delhi, she grew familiar with Manipur while making a film, Some Roots Grow Upwards. The documentary, based on the works of Manipuri theatre director Ratan Thiyam, required her to travel to the state frequently.

Voices of women

This familiarity with Manipur made her relate to the plight of Manipuri women when news of trouble broke out with the custodial killing of Manorama Devi and the naked protest by the mothers of Manipur. “Many video clips of those protests were circulating in Delhi at that time, and I too saw those.

What we saw was horrifying — people being beaten simply because they protested and women protestors being shoved into trucks and dumped miles away from the city. But if you lived in Delhi you hardly ever got to see any of this in mainstream news channels. It was bitterly ironic that so much video coverage of the protests existed in Manipur yet little of it made it to 24 hour news,” she says.

That moved Kavita to make a short film, Tales from the Margins, in 2006. Her film captures the protests, especially non-violent protests by women. The film has since been screened across India and abroad.

Kavita Joshi was in Hyderabad to screen her film at the SN School of Communication and at a screening organized by Moving Images.

In the last four years, screening of the film, she observes, has helped build awareness about the conflict in Manipur. “A lot more can be done and I hope that more people will keep wanting to engage with the situation in Manipur,” she says.

As an independent film-maker who conducts workshops on film-making for students, Kavita contrasts the screenings she had at the University of Hyderabad and Moving Images and says, “Students were keen to know about the nuances of film-making while at Moving Images, there were more questions pertaining to the ‘issue'.” She has been to Hyderabad several times but this visit comes after a gap of a decade.

Talking about her choice of films, she says more than an issue, it's the deeper connect that she feels with an issue that triggers moviemaking.

“In the case of Manipur, it was my personal relationship with the place and the people that drove me to make Tales In Some Roots Grow Upwards,” she says. Now, she is working on a personal narrative about her own family.