Echoes from South Asia

The program tries to coalesce cinematic practices related to South Asia over the last four decades by focussing on the marginal, the unclassifiable and the liminal: modes of filmmaking that run the risk of falling into gaps of dominant film histories. One way to read these films is as a reflection of the diverse and tumultuous nature of the political landscape in South Asia since the 1980s. Preparations for market liberalization, military-infrastructural ambitions of the state, civil wars and transforming lives and working conditions of traditional artisans and the unorganized labor sector, all find direct or elliptical references in the program. By focussing on strongly independent non-fiction filmmaking - both experimental and documentary - and placing value on poetic renderings of quotidian lives, Echoes from South Asia aims to engage with the inexhaustible threads of those marginalized films that too often fall through the gaps of history in the face of inadequate archival and institutional frameworks.

Arindam Sen is an independent curator and writer. He currently works as a programming consultant for Berlinale Forum. He co-founded the Brussels based platform for Experimental film programs, Cinema Parenthèse. He has written for Millennium Film Journal, Senses of Cinema, Lumière and Marg magazine among others.

Funded by  Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa