New Delhi: How challenging is it to run a non-funded feminist film festival in Delhi? The ‘Beyond Borders Feminist Film Festival’ is in its sixth year, and curator Aanchal Kapur is beginning to feel the burden of organising such an event with limited support. Only her goal of making cinema accessible has kept her going for the past few years.
“I have volunteers who are college kids, and this time, I was concerned about even getting them decent food for the work they are putting in. I did not give up, but if we do not get funds next year, I might be forced to not host the festival,” said Kapur, who is the founder of Kriti Film Club.
The annual event has been sustained so far through donations, some from friends and others anonymous. But those, too, dwindled this year.
The film festival showcased 50 films across two venues in Delhi—Alliance Française de Delhi and the India Habitat Centre—from 24 to 30 November.
“When we started it, we were sure we wanted to bring South Asian feminist cinema to the festival, and I was encouraged by Kamla Bhasin to start it. But she passed away all of a sudden. I decided to take it on as a promise I made to her,” said Kapur.
Her curation process is based on platforming films that are issue-based. The festival received 200 submissions this year.
“But since we are a film club that conducts screenings on a regular level, even the rest of the submissions will be shown to people eventually, in other events,” said Kapur.
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Two documentaries
The film festival has seen a footfall of 100-200 people every day, across screenings. On 27 November, the segment titled ‘Hum Milkar Nachenge Gayenge’ or ‘We Rise’ in English screened two documentaries: Bali, a Marathi-language film, and Bali and Where the Light Enters You, which was in Gujarati and English.
Directed by Amoli Birewar, Bali is about a young girl, Sujata, who belongs to the Banjara tribe in rural Maharashtra. She loves watching movies such as Dangal (2016), Bigil (2018) and Seetimarr (2021) on her grandfather’s smartphone, and fights for her dream of becoming a kabaddi player to escape a forced marriage. However, she does not emerge as the hero she wants to be and loses at the district-level tournament, which seals her fate. Sujata got married six months after filming ended.
Laced with wry, observational humour and a keen understanding of the social reality of rural Maharashtra, the documentary gives a glimpse into the lives of young girls living there.
A few hundred kilometres from where Sujata’s story unfolds, Farida, a young girl from the Mir community, is the only one from her commune to attend school. Where the Light Enters You, directed by Matt Alesevich and Hemal Trivedi, shows how Fraida is her father’s darling. She also sells handmade jewellery to foreigners and does household chores. But when her father dies during Covid-19, her fate, too, is marriage.
The film features a volunteer, an NRI doctor who forms a bond with Farida while she treats the members of the Mir community for various diseases. Over time, she gets close to Farida, learning about her dreams and ambitions, urging the young girl to study.
Marriage ties the two documentaries together. However, the gaze in Birewar’s work is empathetic and understanding. On the other hand, in Where the Light Enters You, there is a hint of the White male gaze of Matt Alesevich, with shots of a snake charmer and close-ups of the colourful clothes of the Mir women.
“The screenings made me think about how marriage is violence for most women,” said one audience member.
Another expressed his unease at the exoticisation of the community.
For Kapur, these reactions and discussions mean that her objective is being fulfilled despite the challenges.
“These films are challenging a lot of stereotypes, notions, attitudes, and biases. If we can have these conversations in our film festival, I want to be able to do it,” Kapur said with a smile.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)