A film by Anushka Meenakshi & Iswar Srikumar and produced by Manas Malhotra
83 minutes / 2017/ India/ Chokri with English subtitles
“If not for you, I have no other true love
When we work together the sun sets early
Without you I am nothing”
Close to the India - Myanmar border is the village of Phek in Nagaland. Around 5000 people live here, almost all of whom cultivate rice for their own consumption. As they work in cooperative groups — preparing the terraced fields, planting saplings, or harvesting the grain and carrying it up impossibly steep slopes — the rice cultivators of Phek sing. The seasons change, and so does the music, transforming the mundane into the hypnotic. The love that they sing of is also a metaphor for the need for the other - the friend, the family, the community, to build a polyphony of voices. Stories of love, stories of the field, stories of song, stories in song. ‘Up Down & Sideways’ is a musical portrait of a community of rice cultivators and their memories of love and loss, created from working together on the fields.
Anushka Meenakshi has worked as a filmmaker, and a community video trainer.
Iswar Srikumar is an actor and a lighting/sound designer for theatre. Iswar and Anushka are both members of Perch, a performance collective in Chennai comprising of artists from various disciplines. In 2011, they started
the u-ra-mi-li project (the song of our people), which focuses on stories about music in the everyday, through writing, photograph, performance and film.The u-ra-mi-li project has received support for its work from the India Foundation for the Arts, pad.ma, the Archive and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology and has been selected for the NFDC Film Bazaar WIP Lab (2014) and Docedge Kolkata (2015).
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