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The Lightning Testimonies
| What | Sarai In |
|---|---|
| When |
2007-10-26 16:30
2007-10-26 17:55
2007-10-26 from 16:30 to 17:55 |
| Where | Seminar Room, CSDS |
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Director: Amar Kanwar
Length: 116 mins
Language: English/ Hindi
26th October, 4:30 pm
Seminar Room, CSDS
Why is one image different from the other? Why does an image seem to contain many secrets? What can release them so as to suddenly connect with many unknown lives?
The Lightning Testimonies reflects upon a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through experiences of sexual violence. As the film explores this violence, there emerge multiple submerged narratives, sometimes in people, images and memories, and at other times in objects from nature and everyday life that stand as silent but surviving witnesses. In all narratives the body becomes central – as a sit for honour, hatred and humiliation and also for dignity and protest.
As the stories unfold, women from different times and regions come forward. The film speaks to them directly, trying to understand how such violence is resisted, remembered and recorded by individuals and communities. Narratives hidden within a blue window or the weave of a cloth appear, disappear and are then reborn in another vocabulary at another time. Using a range of visual vocabularies the film moves beyond suffering into a space of quiet contemplation, where resilience creates a potential for transformation.
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Amar Kanwar is an independent film maker, living in and working from New Delhi. Responding to conditions in contemporary India, his films primarily concerns issues relating to violence, politics, ecology and sexuality. While Kanwar’s film A Season Outside (1998) deals with a personal and philosophical passage through many zones of violence and non-violence, another film A Night Of Prophecy (2002), explores poetry in contemporary India through multiple poetic journeys that seek to unravel history, time and the future. His works cover topics as diverse as the history and politics of collecting water in the desert, the physical and mental spaces that men and women carve out for themselves within the family, and ecological interpretations of Buddhism. Other films have dealt with the opposition between globalization and tribal consciousness in the heart of rural India.