Hakim Babu

Hakim Babu 1985

1

A man from lower social background qualifies and gets an administration job and to match his higher social occupation, he leaves his family, friends, and fiance. But gradually he understands his mistake and returns for his people. Finally he finds his wrong decision for the mining in his village has lead to the destruction and down fall of his people and everyone lives the village and him behind alone.

1985

Nani Ma

Nani Ma 2022

10.00

Musamoni Panigrahi (1920s–2017), fondly called “Nani Ma” by her neighbours, appears in the centre of this first film in the Baleswari dialect of India's Odia language. The story revolves around folklore and folk songs narrated by Nani Ma. Born in the 1920s in pre-independent rural India in a coastal village in the Balasore district of Odisha, she never got to go beyond the first few days of school. The film is an alternate history of a society broken through colonization, Brahminical patriarchy and a post-famine (Orissa famine of 1866, killing nearly 5 million people, one-third of the population), and the dominance of formal writing over spoken tongues. Three academics -- Damayanti Beshra, PhD (recipient of India’s fourth civilian award, “Padma Shri”), Panchanan Mohanty, PhD (noted linguist), and Laxmikanta Tripathy, PhD, DLitt (anthropologist and author) -- also appear in the film to provide contextual commentary on patriarchy, oral history and the sociolinguistic diversity.

2022

The Volunteer Archivists

The Volunteer Archivists 2022

1

The Volunteer Archivists tells the story of Srujanika, a volunteer-led collective in the Indian state of Odisha that archived some of the rarest printer publications published in the last 200 years. The archive — Odia Bibhaba — now houses over 10,000 books and hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and dictionaries that otherwise would have been lost forever due to collective negligence and the poor state of digitization by the state archives.

2022

Bringing Down a Mountain

Bringing Down a Mountain 1970

1

A rural village never wanted to be a city’s landfill or a distant blur in Reels but rather home to new imaginations. Bringing Down a Mountain dissects the intersecting themes of access, abolition and caste through the experiences of residents of a rural village and that of a hyper-urban city. The film follows the village residents’ dreams—of mobile data, digital payment and relief from menial work. What happens when the landfill is full, and dreams want to break free?

1970

Gangs of Puri

Gangs of Puri 2022

9.00

Age old rivalry between two head honchos of Puri, Babu Jena and Loka Nana that leads to the creation of a new Nana in town and ultimately ignites a deadly blood feud.

2022