At the Sundance Film Festival 2021, Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh won the Special Jury Award: Impact for Change and the Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category for their debut feature 'Writing With Fire'. On today’s episode, we discuss the political economy of documentary filmmaking, its practitioners’ love-hate relationship with the state (every government media organisation in India is name-checked in this episode!), the influence and legacy of humanism in nonfiction film and whether its future in South Asia lies in TikTok-type formats.
Click here to access the Image+ Guide & view the material being discussed in the podcast: https://sites.google.com/view/artalaap-podcast-resources/episode-8.
Credits:
Producer: Tunak Teas
Design & artwork: Mohini Mukherjee
Marketing: Dipalie Mehta
Musical arrangement: Jayant Parashar
Images: Rintu Thomas & Sushmit Ghosh
Additional support: Kanishka Sharma, Amy Goldstone-Sharma, Raghav Sagar, Shalmoli Halder, Arunima Nair
Audio courtesy: Vernouillet by Blue Dot Sessions [CC BY-NC 4.0]
References:
Kerstin Stutterheim, 'Documentary Film Production Under Neoliberal Circumstances - A Genre in Change', International Science and Humanities Conference 2016, Sharjah.
Kamayani Sharma, 'Reason Being', Artforum, 20 Jun 2019.
Kartik Nair. "Ramsay Brothers: The Men, The Movies, The Memory”. M.Phil Cinema Studies Diss. SAA, JNU. 2010.
Rishi Majumder, 'Ramsay International', Motherland, 2012.