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Routine resistance(s)


Followed by a talk with Nicole Wolf

Shelter 
Uma Segal, India 1983, 38 min, English language, 16mm

Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali (Tobacco Embers)
Yugantar, India 1982, 26 min, Marathi OV with English subtitles, DCP

Routine Resistance(s) features two politically engaged films that combine activist conviction with lyrical interludes. Shelter, the only film by Uma Segal, a promising female film school graduate who died prematurely at the age of 33, deals with slum demolition in Bombay, a major political issue in the early 1980s. Meanwhile Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali was shot by feminist collective Yugantar among the female tobacco factory workers in Nipani, Karnataka in India, and documents the largest movements of unorganized labor of its time which sparked unionizing processes across India throughout the decade.

Nicole Wolf is a researcher and lecturer at the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. She researched extensively on India’s first feminist film collective, Yugantar (1980-83) and assisted in the restoration and digitalisation of their films by Arsenal, Berlin. She recently developed the yugantar.film website archiving the results of her research in collaboration with Deepa Dhanraj, who is a founding member of the collective