THE FIFTH WALL
Navina Sundaram: An Outsider’s Inside View or An Insider’s Outside View
The digital archive
The Fifth Wall gathers films, reportages, moderations, texts, letters and photos by the filmmaker and editor
Navina Sundaram (1945–2022) from over 40 years of her work in television.
Sundaram grew up in New Delhi, India before going to Hamburg in 1964 for an internship at Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR). From 1970, she worked as a political editor, filmmaker, reporter and presenter for the broadcasting company. From 1992–93, she was ARD correspondent and head of South Asia television in New Delhi. On leaving NDR, she continued her work as an independent director of documentaries. Her research and reportage on international affairs and political histories reflect her vantage position at the crossroads of critical postcolonial voices emerging from the global South and the post-war reorganization of western Europe.
Sourced from the archives of German public-service broadcasters (ARD) and Sundaram’s private archive,
The Fifth Wall is a curated look at German migration and media history. Sundaram is thus the prime focus as an author who takes a journalistic stand: on internationalism and decolonization, the question of class, racism, immigration, on Indian and German politics.
The Fifth Wall was conceptualized and developed by
Merle Kröger and
Mareike Bernien (pong film) in collaboration with
Navina Sundaram within the framework of
Archive außer sich – a project of the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art e.V.
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Navina Sundaram grew up in New Delhi, India, where she studied English literature before going to Hamburg in 1964 for a two-year internship at NDR. From 1970, she worked as a political editor for the broadcasting company. She has worked as a filmmaker, reporter and presenter for the programmes
Weltspiegel,
Gesichter Asiens,
Panorama and
extra drei, among others. From 1992 - 93, she was ARD correspondent and head of South Asia television in New Delhi. On leaving NDR, Navina Sundaram continued her work as an independent director of documentaries. She has also authored numerous texts and lectures.
Merle Kröger, novelist and film author, lives in Berlin. Together with the filmmaker Philip Scheffner, she has been making feature documentary films since 2007. In her novels, Kröger combines historical research, personal history and political analysis with elements of crime literature. As a curator of the transnational cultural project
Import Export. Cultural Transfer between India and Germany, Austria (2005), she began a long-term collaboration with Navina Sundaram.
Mareike Bernien lives in Berlin and works as a filmmaker and lecturer in the field of filmic research and critical archival practices. A research-based approach determines her work, in which questions of memory politics and media archaeology are negotiated. Her most recent works include:
Sun Under Ground (2022),
Tiefenschärfe (2017) with Alex Gerbaulet. She has been a part of the production platform pong since several years and works here, amongst others, with Merle Kröger on the archival project
The Fifth Wall.
Rubaica Jaliwala, freelance editor and translator of literary, art and cultural texts and books, lives in Mumbai and Berlin. As trainer and educational advisor, she has led workshops on intercultural learning and diversity, anti-racism and gender on four continents. She has collaborated with
pong film since 2005, for the German-English translation of film subtitles, essays, novels, and the entire archive
The Fifth Wall, including its films, reportages and commentaries. She has also recited excepts of Navina Sundaram’s letters for audio recordings.
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PROGRAMME
Saturday, 1 April 2023, 15:00 –19:00
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi
Decolonizing Practices: Framing News, Circulating Archives
Archives deal with found materials and their annotation. Both these aspects are deeply attached to production conditions and infrastructures for access. And those, in turn, have been influenced by multiple kinds of colonizing schemes. Contemporary archiving campaigns are designed as action strategies to decolonize these hegemonic practices.
Freedom and its Price
25 July 1973 | 43 min. 14 s.
In her second major feature on postcolonial political conditions in South Asia, Navina Sundaram visits the young nation of Bangladesh shortly after its founding. The film begins in a military hospital for young war veterans and questions the price paid for hard-won freedom after the separation from Pakistan. Without any archival footage and using only original recordings and interviews, Sundaram narrates in modern documentary form the story of Bengali nationalism as the strongest political force in the region against the backdrop of colonial history. The freedom struggle is embodied by the ‘father of the nation’, the elected president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and the four pillars of his politics: nationalism, democracy, socialism and secularism. Sundaram traces the implementation of these paradigms in encounters with Hindu and Muslim groups: with migrants from Bihar, farming families and cooperatives. World politics is reflected in the fate of the young nation – Russian, Chinese, Indian and US interests determine Bangladesh’s present.
Participants
Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author living Mumbai and Berlin. She prefers to call herself a cultural producer. She was the executive director of Majlis Culture Centre in Mumbai (1990–2016 and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World (ADKDW) in Cologne, Germany in (2018–2021). She has initiated several public art and archive projects within and outside Majlis and ADKDW.
Vinzenz Hediger is professor of cinema studies at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, where he directs the Graduate Research Training Program ‘Konfigurationen des Films’ (
www.konfigurationen-des-films.de). He is a co-speaker of ‘ConTrust – Trust in Conflict’, an interdisciplinary research initiative in the Normative Orders research centre at Goethe University. He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network of Cinema and Media Studies and the founding editor of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (
www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de).
Monday, 3 April 2023, 15:00–19:00
School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Seminar Room SAA II
Gender performances and Archiving
Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. – Ursula Le Guin
Feminist archiving practice is the development of skills to find, bring into light, to incubate and also to materialise the structures underlying the choice to conceal or to reveal.
Behind Every Curtain A Story
14 October 1989 | 43 min. 43 s.
Broadcast Series: III International
In this feature for ‘III International’, Navina Sundaram returns to her family home in Kasauli in northern India six years after she shot her film
Summer Guests there. For the summer, the artist Vivan Sundaram has made the Kasauli Art Centre available to a group of theatre practitioners and representatives from literature, art, music and feminist theory. The funding is from India; development aid from the West is deliberately avoided. With the title ‘Nayika Bhed’, a play is being developed for the specially constructed open-air stage against the backdrop of the Himalayas. The group, led by theatre professor and director Anuradha Kapur, is developing a scenic manifesto from biographical stories that combines mythological female figures with contemporary theories of feminism. They want to shift patriarchal emphases, annotate history and create a new theatre-form between self-representation and agitprop. Thus, the story is channelled through the figure of Mahadevi Akka, the passionate 12th-century poet–saint who sheds her clothes and confronts the world with her erotic poetry. The summer ends with a certainty: the silence is broken.
Participants
Anuradha Kapur is a theatre maker and teacher. Her plays have travelled nationally and internationally, and she has taught in universities in India and abroad. She is the founder of Vivadi, a working group of theatre makers, visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers. She won the Sangeet Natak Akademi award for Direction in 2004. Anuradha Kapur completed her term as Director, National School of Drama, New Delhi, in 2013. She is presently Visiting Professor at Ambedkar University Delhi.
A. Mangai is the pseudonym of Dr V. Padma. She is a retired professor in English from Stella Maris College, Chennai. She has been actively engaged in Tamil theatre as an actor, director and playwright for close to four decades. She has been a founding member of Chennai Kalai Kuzhu, Sakthi, Palkalai Arangam, Voicing Silence and Marappachi. Her fields of interest are theatre, gender and translation studies.
Bishnupriya Dutt is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. Her area of research includes politics and theatre, feminist readings of Indian Theatre, and contemporary performance practices and popular culture. Her most recent publication is
Maya Rao and Indian Feminist Theatre (Cambridge, 2022). She is currently the Vice President of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Bishnupriya has been involved in active theatre in Calcutta since 1960s with the Little Theatre Group and later People’s Little Theatre, where she performs and directs.
Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator and author living Mumbai and Berlin. She prefers to call herself a cultural producer. She was the executive director of Majlis Culture Centre in Mumbai (1990–2016 and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World (ADKDW) in Cologne, Germany in (2018–2021). She has initiated several public art and archive projects within and outside Majlis and ADKDW.
*Programmes subject to change.
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