Duration: 68 minutes, 2016, English/Hindi, with English subtitles
A film directed by Anupama Chandra and Uma Tanuku
'The Books We Made' is a documentary inspired by the work of Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon, both of whom co-founded the first feminist publishing house in India: “Kali for Women". The film is about the joy and pain of surviving in two non-lucrative professions: that of writing for small, discerning audiences; and that of publishing, translating and promoting work barely known outside its own linguistic region in India. The film looks back on Butalia and Menon's thirty years in publishing, and focusses on the feminist politics and friendships that made this survival possible. Butalia and Menon chose to publish writing that had no audience at the time. They succeeded not only in staying afloat, but in developing a readership interested in their books.
The film was awarded the Special Jury Mention at the Trivandrum International Film Festival
Anupama Chandra
She is a film editor, director and teacher. She has graduated with a diploma in film editing from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, India and has degrees in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, UK and St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Over the last twenty years she has worked as an editor on several
documentary films, with noted directors such as Amar Kanwar [The Torn First pages; Somewhere in May], Saba Dewan [Delhi-Bombay-Delhi; Naach; The other Song], Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam [Some Questions About The Nature of Your Existence; The Sun Behind The Clouds], and many
others. She started on her own directorial venture with the film 'The Books We Made' [co-directed with Uma Tanuku], which won a Special Jury mention at the Trivandrum International Film Festival. She has also edited a film on the partition of the Indian subcontinent Pichla Varka [dir: Priyanka Chhabra]; and another long documentary on women and politics in the Lucknow of the 1940s, Ek Inquilab Aur Aaya [dir: Uma Chakravarty]. Anupama also teaches film editing and direction at schools and universities.
Uma Tanuku
She is a freelance filmmaker based in New Delhi, India. She graduated from the University of Madras and then from Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in management and international trade. To explore herself in the field of film making, she studied film direction at the Film & Television Institute of India, following which, she has been involved as a line producer with documentary projects made for BBC, UNDP, Doordarshan, Ministry of External Affairs, Govt. of India, Public Service Broadcasting Trust and others. Her first film Night Hawks (2012), a documentary which was shot in a purely observational style, and looks at the city from the perspective of people who work at night and reveals multiple stories that often go unnoticed. Uma was also the Festival Co-Director the IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival and the festival director for its 10th edition in 2016. Uma had also helped run the Delhi Film Archive, a documentary filmmakers’ collective and had worked on an UNDP program on South Asian Masculinities.
Reviews of the film in The Hindu, Scroll and other publications:
The Hindu
Scroll
YKA
First Post
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You can watch the film here.
After the screening, from about 8:00 pm IST, you can join both the film makers Anupama Chandra and Uma Tanuku for a live discussion on Facebook.
Kindly click https://www.facebook.com/goetheinstitut.Kolkata/ to participate in the open discussion.
You can ask questions by writing in the 'comment' section while the live stream of the discussion is being broadcast.
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