Archiv für Schlagwort Südasien

Indischer Film jenseits von Glamour und Stereotypen

Das 11. Indische Filmfestival in Stuttgart, 17.-20. Juli 2014

 

Ein Festivalbericht von Fritzi-Marie Titzmann und Alexandra Schott

Im Laufe einer Dekade hat sich das Indische Filmfestival in Stuttgart einen festen Platz in der Welt der indischen Filmfestivals in Europa und im jährlichen Kalender Indien-Begeisterter gesichert. Das Festival, das bis einschließlich 2011 unter dem Titel „Bollywood and Beyond“ lief, konnte auch in diesem Jahr wieder mit einem abwechslungsreichen Filmprogramm überzeugen. Das Rahmenprogramm reichte von den sogenannten „Tea Talks“, u.a. zur Parlamentswahl 2014 in Indien oder dem boomenden Online-Heiratsmarkt, über Tanzworkshops bis hin zu kleinen Musik- und Tanzvorführungen sowie dem Shah Rukh Khan Wunschfilm.

Das komplette Programm mit Kurzbeschreibungen zu allen Filmen findet sich unter:
www.indisches-filmfestival.de.

Lesen Sie den kompletten Bericht auf dem Informationsportal zu Südasien suedasien.info unter:

http://www.suedasien.info/analysen/3251

13. August 2014 | Veröffentlicht von | Kein Kommentar »
Veröffentlicht unter News
Verschlagwortet mit , ,

New Media Configurations – Changing Societies? Current Research Perspectives on South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa – CONFERENCE REPORT

von Bettina Gräf

The three-day international conference was organised by Nadja-Christina Schneider (Humboldt University Berlin) and hosted by the Deutsche-Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) research network “Medialisation and Social Change Outside Europe: South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Arab-Speaking Region” (2011–2014). It took place in November 2013 at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University Berlin and was composed of five thematic panels, three keynote lectures, a poster presentation, a film screening and a final discussion round. Encompassing four regions, the panels dealt with media art and documentary filmmaking (1.), the political economy of the media (2.), changing media and religious renegotiations (3.), gender and changing identities (4.) and converging media and changing practices (5.) …

Read full report online:

http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/index.asp?pn=tagungsberichte&id=5295

Find more informations about the conference online:

https://iaaw.hu-berlin.de/medialitaet/conference

‚Quaid‘ – People‘s Cinemas in the Age of Digital Filmmaking

von Max Kramer

 

A couple of days ago, on the 13th and the 14th of February (2014), I was attending the annual conference of the Gorakhpur Film Festival Movement (GFM) which was held at the Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi. Since its inception in the year 2006 the GFM spread to fourteen cities and towns in northern India, most of them located in the economically weaker areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan. The festival movement (mind the second component: movement) thrives due to the conjunction of new technologies and innovative work: digital projectors make new screening venues reachable and the new connectivities established between local film societies and the central highly mobile unit called ‚the group‘, which is based in Delhi, seem to generate the continuity and rapid expansion. ‚The group‘ promotes the concept of an inter-media platform, combining films with poetry, painting, music, academic lectures and film-related publishing in Hindi. During this year’s conference, the participants were reflecting upon their past work and planning their future strategies. Representatives of about a dozen cities were present. Among those invited to join the network this year was Mohad Gani, a self-taught filmmaker from Mathura who proposed to launch a local edition of the Cinema of Resistance, as the festivals of the GFM are called. I want to tell a few stories surrounding his film Quaid (Imprisoned, 2014) as they disclose some potentials of an independent digital film culture and the new ways of public engagement it relates to. Such an understanding should, however, be properly contextualized; in other words, we will start our journey from Mathura.

Most people in South Asia know Mathura for the adventurous stories of Lord Krishna, the amorous god, the war consultant and the ‚cunning‘ child. Until I saw Quaid, the only films from Mathura I knew belong, perhaps, to the most South Asian of all genres: the yatra-film. Images of temples invite the believer to enter a mediated pilgrimage, a voiceover introduces us to the mythologies of the place while the eyes of divine statues bestow auspicious looks.

However, with Mohad Gani’s fiercely independent film, something rather different emerged from the banks of the Yamuna River. This film is remarkable not only due to its place of origin, but because it tells us something about the potentials of filmmaking in our age. It reminds us that, sometimes, you need nothing more than a relevant subject, a dedicated theater group, your house, an elementary school, a self-taught filmmaker and 2000 Rupees (around 25 €) to make a good movie.

The narrative, based on a short story by Gyan Prakash Vivek, is about a strong-willed boy who is caught in the webs of a malfunctioning school and the business of religiously legitimized quacks. At school, the boy’s creative wit is more feared than being acknowledged. This initiates a destructive circle where, through the ostracism of his Hindi teacher, the boy closes himself off and turns more and more aggressive towards his surroundings. Instead of looking into the dynamics of the conflict, his parents consult a tantric baba who advises them to lock the boy into a room until he would come to his senses again. The plot takes a turn when an open-minded teacher joins the local school. He learns about the locked up boy on the roof and carefully attempts to establish contact with him. He slowly builds up trust and reassembles the causes which led to the boy’s imprisonment.

This film can perhaps best be understood as a cultural artifact circulating in a web of stories weaved around it. Beyond the screens of commercially ‚big‘ cinema, the filmmakers often travel along with their films and discuss them with local audiences, thereby adding multiple layers of narrative to the meaning of the film performance. These layers may include the story of the production of the film or some biographical sketches of the professional struggle of the filmmakers.

Mohad Gani did not visit school for more than four years and elementary education in state run schools in non-metropolitan India is well known for its notoriously bad condition. When he was about fifteen years old, he taught himself how to read and write Hindi. Together with some friends, Gani launched a street theater group called Sanket Rangtoli. He wanted to make films but he did not have the money to buy a camera. Getting admission to a film school was, of course, out of question. Again Gani taught himself to edit and direct a film. With his sewing work and the help of some friends he managed to save enough money to buy a camera. Together with the street theater group and some family members, he started producing Quaid about a year ago. They also set up a local film society called Jan Cinema (People’s Cinema) and bought a projector. With this projector the group travels through the city, bringing their films to the audiences they want to address, just as they have done before with the street theater performances. These films are, of course, not just shown, but also discussed with the audience.

Technical stories about minimal budget projects are often fun to hear and sometimes instructive to understand the potentials of digital filmmaking. Just one example: for building a camera dolly the crew put wheels under a table and fixed a chair on top of it. There are some aspects of a ‚third cinema‘ (e.g. Solanas/Gettino/Espinosa) which only came to a broader realization after digital film technology really took off. One way to understand this is in relation to the mobilities of independent film practices. Just as the street theater, films such as Quaid and their crews are coming to your part of town and maybe screen their next film on your neighbour’s wall. They provide us with a glimpse of emerging practices of political filmmaking in South Asia. By engaging in collectively negotiated processes of meaning, they pose a challenge to established modes of production. The next months will show how far Quaid will travel and how it will engage with audiences in South Asia and perhaps beyond. In the meantime, Jan Cinema is already planning their next feature film.

Find an additional article („Cinema of Resistance“) on this Topic online under: http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2011/10/4174

11. März 2014 | Veröffentlicht von | Kein Kommentar »
Veröffentlicht unter Allgemein
Verschlagwortet mit , ,

Masala – Newsletter Jg. 8 Nr. 3, Juli 2013

Newsletter der virtuellen Fachbibliothek Südasien.

Nachwuchswissenschaftler_innen stellen ihre Forschungsprojekte aus den unterschiedlichsten Bereichen der Südasienwissenschaften und Indologie vor. Daneben informiert Sie der Newsletter über Ausstellungen, Vorträge und Konferenzen sowie Neuigkeiten aus dem Sondersammelgebiet Südasien und Savifa.

Wir möchten insbesondere auf die Vorstellung des Dissertationsprojekts von Dr. des. Fritzi-Marie Titzmann „Translokale und lokale Dynamiken eines globalen Medienphänomens: Zum Wandel weiblicher Subjektivität und Handlungsfähigkeit am Beispiel des indischen Online-Heiratsmarktes“ hinweisen.

Den kompletten Newsletter finden Sie unter:https://blogs.hu-berlin.de/mediaiaaw/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2013/07/MASALA_Newsletter-jg.-8-Nr.-3-Juli-2013.pdf

3. Juli 2013 | Veröffentlicht von | Kein Kommentar »
Veröffentlicht unter Allgemein
Verschlagwortet mit , ,

e-Diasporas

The e-Diasporas Atlas is a unique experiment in research on diasporas as well as in publishing, a first in the restitution of scientific findings and their presentation. Historically, the emergence of e-diasporas occurred in tandem with the diffusion of the Internet and the development of multiple online public services. At the end of the 1990s, a number of institutions joined forces with the new ‘e’-technologies (e-administration, e-democracy, e-education, e-healthcare, e-culture, e-tourism), which gave rise to the first presence on the Web of associations run by migrant populations. If the earliest websites were produced by IT professionals, we soon saw the diffusion of the Web in all of the diasporic communities and at all levels. The last ten years witnessed the use of both Webs 1.0 and 2.0 in these communities as well as the widespread appropriation of the various social-networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). These new communication and organization practices have produced a vast, moving e-corpus, whose exploration, analysis and archiving have never before been attempted. The outcome of the efforts of more than 80 researchers worldwide, the e-Diasporas Atlas is the first of its kind, with some 8,000 migrant websites archived and observed in their interactions.

You find the e-Diasporas Atlas under this link: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/index.html#top

Especially interesting in context with this blog are the following working papers:

Cyber-Hindutva: Hindu nationalism, the diaspora and the Web
By Ingrid Therwath (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/therwath.html)

Sikh Narratives: An Analysis of Virtual Diaspora Networks
By Priya Kumar (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/kumar-sikh.html)

Transnational Tamil Networks: Mapping Engagement Opportunities on the Web
By Priya Kumar (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/kumar-tamil.html)

Overview of research on the Indian e-diaspora
By Éric Leclerc (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/leclerc.html)

Indian migrants of Kerala in the Web
By Marie Percot & Philippe Venier (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/kerala.html)

Exploring migrant Indian real-estate on the Web
By Aurélie Varrel (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/varrel.html)

Nepalese diasporic websites, signs and conditions of a diaspora in the making?
By Tristan Bruslé (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/brusle.html)

South Asianism: Web activisim and identity politics
By Anouck Carsignol (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/carsignol.html)

Discovering the Zoroastrian e-diaspora
By David Knaute (Find abstract and paper under: http://www.e-diasporas.fr/wp/knaute.html)

28. November 2012 | Veröffentlicht von | Kein Kommentar »
Veröffentlicht unter Allgemein
Verschlagwortet mit , , ,
Muslimas in Fernost

Muslimas in Fernost

11.05.2012 Von Daniela Siebert

 

Den vollständigen Artikel finden Sie unter:

http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/tagfuertag/1753504/

Muslimische Frauen: Ihre Rechte sind in fernöstlichen Ländern sehr unterschiedlich ausgeprägt. (Bild: AP)

Muslimische Frauen: Ihre Rechte sind in fernöstlichen Ländern sehr unterschiedlich ausgeprägt. (Bild: AP)

 

In diesem Artikel führt Siebert ein Interview mit Prof. Schröter über die Rolle und Rechte der muslimischen Frauen in Südostasien.

29. Mai 2012 | Veröffentlicht von | Kein Kommentar »
Veröffentlicht unter News