INVOKING JUSTICE (2011) with filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj

(Deepa Dhanraj, 2011, 82 min, digital)

The films of documentary filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj take shape within environments of collective struggle and shared testimony, seeking to depict and advance movements for economic, reproductive, civil, and human rights in India from the bottom up. Beginning with her earliest collaborations with the radical Yugantar filmmaking collective in the early 1980s, Dhanraj's work is guided by a feminist practice of committed listening, claiming space on screen for the demands and the dignity of unheard women and minorities. This project has brought the filmmaker to the front lines of gender and caste discrimination, labor disputes, religious and sexual persecution, and beyond. 

This fall, Block Cinema and the MFA in Documentary Media welcome the filmmaker for a two-night retrospective chronicling the movement for women’s rights in India across four decades of her work. INVOKING JUSTICE (2011) confronts the Jamaat system of civil justice in Southern India, a structure which adjudicates family claims through all-male Islamic Sharia tribunals. Dhanraj centers this engrossing film in the work of the first women’s Jamaat, established in 2004, which provides thousands of women with both a mechanism for advocacy and justice, and a forum for women to intimately describe and collectively analyze their individual and collective situation. 

Following the screening, Dhanraj will appear for discussion and audience Q&A. 

Presented with support from the MFA in Documentary Media, the Hoffman Visiting Artist Fund for Documentary, and the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern University.

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