TOBACCO EMBERS (1982) and SOMETHING LIKE A WAR (1991) with Deepa Dhanraj

(Deepa Dhanraj/Yugantar, 1982-1991, approx 80 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 Deepa Dhanraj for a two-night retrospective chronicling women’s rights activism in India across four decades of her work. For TOBACCO EMBERS (1982), Dhanraj and her Yugantar collaborators embedded among female tobacco factory workers during an unprecedented wave of organizing and demonstration. The film thrillingly attests to the urgency and transformative power of the labor struggle during a time of awakening consciousness for women. In SOMETHING LIKE A WAR (1991), Dhanraj exposes the abuses of India’s family planning system, centering the voices of working-class women as they narrate and contest their treatment by  chauvinistic state program designed to control women’s bodies. 

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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