TOBACCO EMBERS (1982) and SOMETHING LIKE A WAR (1991) with filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj
(Deepa Dhanraj/Yugantar, 1982-1991, approx 80 min, digital)

The films of documentary filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj take shape within environments of collective struggle and shared testimony, seeking to depict and advance movements for economic, reproductive, civil, and human rights in India from the bottom up. Beginning with her earliest collaborations with the radical Yugantar filmmaking collective in the early 1980s, Dhanraj’s work is guided by a feminist practice of committed listening, claiming space on screen for the demands and the dignity of unheard women and minorities. This project has brought the filmmaker to the front lines of gender and caste discrimination, labor disputes, religious and sexual persecution, and beyond.

This fall, Block Cinema and the MFA in Documentary Media welcome the filmmaker for a two-night retrospective chronicling the movement for women’s rights in India across three decades of her work. For TOBACCO EMBERS (1982), Dhanraj and her Yugantar collaborators embedded within a collective labor movement among female tobacco factory workers during an unprecedented wave of demonstrating and organizing. The film thrillingly attests to the urgency and transformative power of the labor struggle during a time of awakening consciousness for women. In SOMETHING LIKE A WAR (1991), Dhanraj exposes the abuses of India’s family planning system, centering the voices of working-class women as they narrate and contest their treatment by chauvinistic state program designed to control women’s bodies.

Films screened:

TOBACCO EMBERS (Yugantar Film Collective, 1982, 27 min, B&W, restored DCP courtesy of Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art)

SOMETHING LIKE A WAR (Deepa Dhanraj, 1991, 63 min, color, digital courtesy of Women Make Movies)

Total Runtime: ~90 mins

Following the screening, Dhanraj will appear for discussion and audience Q&A.

Presented with support from the MFA in Documentary Media, the Hoffman Visiting Artist Fund for Documentary, and the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern University.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Deepa Dhanraj is a researcher, writer and an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker. She’s been active in filmmaking andwriting for over forty years and has engaged with questions related to women’s status, political participation and resistance ever since. Dhanraj was also one of the founding members of the feminist film collective Yugantar. Her films have been screened and awarded at national and international film festivals.

FREE & OPEN TO ALL

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Tags: Block Museum, Cinema, Deepa Dhanraj, Evanston, Film Screening, free, Northwestern University, SOMETHING LIKE A WAR, TOBACCO EMBERS