Cinematic Friendships and Political Fiction

The screening of Sara Gómez’ DE CIERTA MANERA (1974) started a trajectory of feminist filmmaking as political fiction. We discussed the film in relation to other filmmaking practices where the merging of documentary and fictional modalities stems from the deep political involvement of the filmmakers, including Yugantar’s IDI KATHA MAATRAMENA?/ YEH SIRF KAHANI HAI? (1983). In each case the developed film language projects on screen the questions and desires linked to imagining ones present otherwise, new possibilities of listening are created and hereby a politics for a present to come proposed. This session thus traced a history of cinematic friendships across geographical locations as a background to recent examples in India and elsewhere and proposed contemporary cinematic and political affiliations.

“Everything changes, when you change it” - Current urgencies, feminist legacies and political fictions

This workshop started from three moments where the expansion of a documentary language repertoire evolved together with the questioning of an available political and judicial vocabulary. Each instance was produced from the vantage point of being a participant of a political movement while pushing representational practices through experimenting with political fiction. The women’s movements in India, from the early 80s to the early 90s, formed the concrete context, starting from the specificity of these moments to locate their particular enabling as well as challenging conditions with a view to thinking through the relations between cultural and political practice today.

The very importance of activating feminist legacies for interventionist cultural practices – cultures of the left - in the now was posed and probed at the same time. Addressing instances of a political archive of still and moving images was not for reasons of nostalgia but to first take account and narrate feminist forms of radicality in the past and to then critically reflect the possibility of reactivating their potential while acknowledging our respective historical or geographical distance to them.

How does an active linking between the urgencies, conditions and practices of the past and the present look like? Without viewing the past as a manual or tool kit to be replicated, what can be gained from reflecting on the kinds of resources that were deployed through film and art practices for interventionist practices? How were collectivity, friendship, pedagogy, standing-with in political and creative work, practised and thought? How was the relation between open and autonomous gatherings and working in and through institutions or political parties debated? How was the need to challenge set representations addressed and new languages forged?