The beginnings of enquiry
The exhibition at
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan with the students of the
Creative Documentary Course (CDC) is a proposal for
Unravelling, Gleaning and Fragmenting as modes of enquiry into documentary film.
Footnotes on Documentary Practice invites conversations and questions around seeing, framing, thinking and listening to the world and to ourselves, as documentary practitioners. The exhibition seeks to find ways to articulate, through multiple forms and experiments, the ephemeral processes of making and witnessing in a landscape of wildly fluctuating truths. Do our responses require a new set of ethics as we manoeuvre this complex terrain? And what of our increasingly tenuous relationship to questions around reality and representations of it?
The students at CDC have been through a journey of reflection and making for several months as part of their course. Hence the processes leading up to the exhibition will be within frames of footnotes, working notes, annotations and drafts. We are looking for forms for tentativeness, restless queries, unfinished rummaging and incomplete but significant discoveries. The expectations from documentary tropes are shifting and there are few footholds for reinventing and unlearning. The exhibition will attempt to inhabit this place of difficulty and simultaneously a possible freedom, within this shift.
Creative Documentary Course
The
Creative Documentary Course (CDC) at
Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication (SACAC) is an intensive programme in filmmaking. Over 18 months, students embark on a rigorous journey, unravelling some central concerns in non-fiction cinema - ideas of Reality, Truth and Representation. The pedagogical processes nudge the students to question monolithic, homogenous and categorical definitions. The course lays emphasis on exploring multiple interpretations of the realities around us, to examine and reflect on our own contexts and socio-political positions in the world. We work with the belief that all narratives, themes and subjects have been addressed by someone, somewhere, sometime. True originality lies in developing a perspective through observation, research and understanding, making one’s own discoveries in the process.
The students are instilled with the rigour to question the personal, the ethical and the aesthetic choices that they make at various stages of filmmaking, with the strong cognizance of how these formal, informal processes shape the politics of representation in cinematic practice.
CDC was initiated in 2013, and is the first of its kind in India. In addition to the on-going 18 month CDC course, the CDC team has initiated a new program, Moving Image: Open Form: 6 month course in filmmaking (MIC). MIC will admit six to eight participants, and commence January 2018.
CDC and MIC announce a collaboration with Thinking Film and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, commencing 2017.
Thinking Film initiative supports pedagogical interventions and enquiries in film and other forms of image making. Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan is a cultural organisation, active across the world. In collaboration with various local partners, the institute promotes a wide spectrum of cultural, artistic and reflexive programs and projects.
Participating Students
Abhinava Bhattacharyya | Akanksha Gupta| Anuradha Bansal | Aparna Bansal | Arunima Tenzin Tara | Aviva Dharmaraj | Gagandeep Singh | Mallika Visvanathan | Vasuki Chandak
Exhibition Concept and Design: Priya Sen, in collaboration with the students and faculty of CDC.
Priya Sen is a filmmaker who works across video, installation and sound.
CDC Faculty
Sameera Jain, Course Director: Sameera is a director and editor with over 30 years of experience. She has been mentoring film students and filmmakers on diverse platforms and has taught at several film institutions, including her alma mater, the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). In 2013, she initiated the Creative Documentary Course at Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communication.
Ruchika Negi, Core Faculty: Ruchika is a filmmaker and visual artist and has been teaching in the Creative Documentary Course since 2015. Some of her films and installation works include,
Every Time You Tell A Story,
Cracks I Seldom Reveal,
Rain Is For Free, among others.
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