Filmography       

Saba Dewan and Rahul Roy, founder trustees of Aakar, studied film making at the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi from 1985 to 87 and since have been making documentaries on various themes.

Saba Dewan’s films have focused on communalism, gender and sexuality. She is at present working on an India Foundation for the Arts supported research project on tawaif (courtesan) art and sexuality.
Rahul Roy has worked in the area of labour, masculinities and communalism. Besides making films he has been working on the issue of masculinities with national and international non governmental groups.

Selected Filmography        

Riya dances in the beer bars of Mumbai to make a living. The documentary follows her from her home in Delhi to Mumbai where hundreds of working class girls come in search of work and a future. Riya’s future is unpredictable and the present is marked with its own difficulties. The police harass her family in Delhi, there is constant pressure from her agent in Mumbai to attract more tips ands the work itself is demanding. However, there are other girls to have fun with, there is money to dress well and then there are men… admirers promising the moon. The documentary is an intimate portrait of the everyday in the life of the girls, their agents and their neighbourhoods.  

Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi, shot in the backdrop of the Maharashtra Governments’ controversial move to ban girls from dancing in beer bars, interweaves stories of gender, labour, sexuality and popular culture within an increasingly globalized economy.

Festivals:

• International Documentary Festival Amsterdam IDFA, 2006
• Zagreb Documentary Film Festival, 2007
• 2007 NY Arab and South Asian Film Festival, USA
• International Association of Women in Radio and Television Film Festival, India 2007  
• PSBT International gender and sexuality film festival, New Delhi, 2007
• 3 Screens Film Festival, India Social Forum, 2006
• South Asian Human Rights Festival, New York, March 2006
• One World Human Rights Film Festival, Prague, 2008
• Goettingen International Film Festival, Germany

Sunder Nagri (Beautiful City) is a small working class colony on the margins of India’s capital city, Delhi. Most families residing here come from a community of weavers. The last ten years have seen a gradual disintegration of the handloom tradition of this community under the globalisation regime. The families have to cope with change as well as reinvent themselves to eke out a living.

The City Beautiful is the story of two families struggling to make sense of a world, which keeps pushing them to the margins.

Radha and Bal Krishan are at a critical point in their relationship. Bal Krishan is underemployed and constantly cheated. They are in disagreement about Radha going out to work. However, through all their ups and downs they retain the ability to laugh.

Shakuntla and Hira Lal hardly communicate. They live under one roof with their children but are locked in their own sense of personal tragedies.

Festivals:

• The Leipzig International Documentary Festival, 2003, Germany
• Other Worlds Are Breathing, World Social Forum, Mumbai, 2004
• Cinema Du Reel, Paris, 2004
• Munich International Documentary Film Festival, 2004
• Goettingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, germany, 2004
• Jeevika National Livelihood Documentary Festival, Delhi, 2004
• Vikalp: Films For Freedom, 2004, Mumbai
• Beeld Voor Beeld, Amsterdam, 2004
• Vermont International Film Festival, USA, 2004
• Filmer à tout prix, Brussels, 2004
• Lisbon International Documentary Festival, Portugal, 2004
• RAI International Ethnographic Film Festival, UK

Awards:

• Le Prix international de la Scam at Cinema Du Reel
• Second Prize at Jeevika Documentary Festival

Explores memory and the mysterious ways in which it is transmitted from mothers to daughters. It is about the family, the primary site of struggle for women and it is about the outside, forbidden territory to be negotiated at considerable peril.

The film is a personal journey of the filmmaker about three generations of women from her family, spanning between their lives the turbulent decades of India in the making. Childhood and excavating ambivalent memories around the figure of the mother is the central thread of the film.

Festivals:

• Zanzibar International Film Festival, 2003
• Film South Asia, Kathmandu, 2003
• Asian Social Forum, Hyderabad, 2002
• UNESCO/PSBT International Film Festival, Delhi, 2002

Aslam sells medicines for sexual problems on the pavements of Meena Bazaar in near Jama Masjid in Delhi… Khalifa Barkat presides over an akhara in the adjacent park and puts a group of young men through the moral and physical grind of wrestling… Through the park and the market pass hundreds of men every day… Majma explores the instability and insecurity of working class lives and its impact on male sexuality and gender relations.

Majma has been made under a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Festivals:

• Yamagata International Documentary Festival, Asian Currents Japan, 2001
• International Documentary Festival (idfa) Silver Wolf competition, Amsterdam, 2001
• Cracow International Film Festival, Poland, 2002
• Munich International Documentary Festival, Germany, 2002
• Goettingen International Ethnographic Film Festival, Germany, 2002.
• Selected for the Ethno Filmfest, Berlin, 2002
• RAI International Ethnographic Film Festival, Durham
• Film South Asia, Kathmandu, Nepal, 2003
• Kara International Film Festival, Karachi, Pakistan, 2003
• Humjinsi International Film Festival of Sexual and Gender
• Plurality, Bombay 2003.

WHEN FOUR FRIENDS MEET…
Duration: 43 minutes
Year: 2000
Directed by: Rahul Roy

When four friends meet… they share with the camera their secrets… sex and girls; youthful dreams and failures; frustrations and triumphs.

Bunty, Kamal, Sanjay and Sanju, best of friends and residents of Jehangirpuri, a working class colony on the outskirts of Delhi are young and trying to make their lives in an environment which is changing rapidly… girls seem to be very bold… stable jobs are not easy to come by… sex is a strange mix of guilt and pleasure… families are claustrophobic… and the blur of television the only sounding board.

The documentary was part of South Asian package under which four films were made in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The project was supported by Save The Children(UK) and UNICEF.

Screenings:

• Hawaii International Film Festival
• Special Screening At The UN, New York
• Munich International Film Festival
• North-South International Film Festival, Geneva.
• Goettingen International Ethnogeraphic Film Festival,
• Germany, 2002.
• Unesco/Psbt International Film Festival, New Delhi, 2003

BUNDELKHAND EXPRESS
Duration: 72 minutes
Year: 1999
Directed by: Saba Dewan

Bundelkhand Express is a labour train. It picks up hundreds of children and adults deserting the impoverished districts of southern Uttar Pradesh, India in search of work. Some of these people are heading towards neighbouring Mirzapur – the capital of carpet production in India. The documentary connects the stories of these children and their parents with the carpet economy. Traditional craft and global capital, meticulous craftsmen and non-artisan exporters tied together by a thin and fine thread, woven into a nightmare.

Festivals:

• International Human Rights Film Festival, Nuremberg, Germany.
• Mumbai International Film Festival, Mumbai, India.
• CHINGARI, the South Asian Film Festival, University of Wisconsin, USA
• Desh Pardes, the annual South Asian cultural festival, Toronto, Canada.

RED EARTH
Duration: 40 minutes,
Year: 1996
Directed by: Rahul Roy

The documentary explores the world of Indian wrestling and the tenets it still holds dear to itself – Bhakti (devotional religion), Shakti (divine energy) and Brahmacharya (celibacy) – even as it negotiates with changing times and newer notions of masculinity.

Screenings:

• Film South Asia Festival, Nepal,1997.
• Mumbai International Film Festival, India, 1997

KHEL
Duration: 100 minutes
Year: 1994
Directed by: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy:

Had there ever been an alternative to the brahmanical vision of fettered and bound female sexuality ? The film makers undertake a journey through Bundelkhand in search of the elusive Yoginis (divine female spirits). They meet kol tribal women, see some forgotten medieval shaktic temples and have some strange adventures. But do they find the answers ?

Screened At The Film De Femmes Festival, Creitel, 1996.

THE BANKURA STORY
Duration: 40 minutes
Year: 1993
Directed by: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy:

A documentary on the collaboration between the Centre For Women’s Development Studies, a Delhi based women’s group and the tribal women of Bankura, West Bengal to reclaim wastelands and set up one of the most significant women’s movement in India.

BEYOND THE FRAGMENTS
Duration: 53 minutes
Year: 1991
Directed by. Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy

Mahila Samakhya – a women’s development project in Uttar Pradesh is mobilising rural women to reflect critically on their status and demand a change in their lives. The documentary explores the journey these women have made, both socially and emotionally, in their one year with the programme.

NASOOR
Duration: 70 minutes
Year: 1991
Directed by: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy)

This documentary is the story of Meerut caught in a vortex of communal riots. Shot between 1987 and 1989, Nasoor examines the post riot communal processes which prepare the grounds for further violence and hatred between the people of Meerut.

DHARMAYUDHA (THE HOLY WAR)
Duration: 40 minutes
Year:1989
Directed by: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy

The first documentary to come out on the Ram Janam Bhoomi/Babari Masjid controversy, it follows the leadership of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Babari Masjid Action Committee on their campaign trail in Uttar Pradesh. The documentary captures the communal campaign unleashed by the leadership of the two movements.

INVISIBLE HANDS, UNHEARD VOICES
Year: 1988
Directed by: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy

A series of documentaries on the work status of women in rural India and the impact of State policies and modern agricultural technologies on their lives.

Screened At

• The International Conference On Women
  And Appropriate Technologies Held Under The Aegis Of The Indian Council Of Agricutural Research At New Delhi, 1989.
• The Cinema Du Reel Festival, Paris, 1990.
• Best Film At The UGC Video Festival, Calcutta.