Doors open at 6.30pm. Refreshments will be available before the film begins. 

Join us for this programme of three short films, which brings together Sudesha, made in 1983 by Yugantar, India’s first feminist film collective, with two films made in 2015 and 2018 by Mumbai-based filmmaker Payal Kapadia. Screening in the context of Sayan Chanda’s exhibition Between the Two Fires, the programme explore womens’ lives within political and personal frames, centring womens’ experience – their relationships with their families, communities and environments and with their own pasts – through the prisms of the natural and domestic worlds, shared action, physical labour, personal ritual, memory and dreamlike states. 

The last of four films made by Yugantar in the early 1980s focusing on political friendship, solidarity, labour rights and violence against women, Sudesha is a portrait of Sudesha Devi, a village activist in the Chipko forest conservation movement in the foothills of the Himalayas, where people’s livelihoods depend on the forest that is threatened by powerful timber traders. While men often work away from home, women carry out the day to day jobs, chopping wood, gathering food, bundling and carrying firewood, forming deep bonds with the land whilst navigating family life and the need to make a living. At the same time, we see them engaged in active political resistance as they organise and protest. Sudesha was commissioned as part of a film series entitled ‘As women see it. How do women see their lives and their future?’, which included seven documentary films from India, Senegal, Peru, Nicaragua, Egypt, Italy and Germany, and was produced by Faust Films over 1981-1983. ’ 

In Payal Kapadia’s beautiful nocturne, The Last Mango Before the Monsoon, we track two conservationists as they walk through a dense forest at night, setting up cameras to document animal activities. Faraway on the end of a city, a woman sits eating a mango by an open door, looking out searchingly into the night. We come to learn that she moved away from the forest a long time ago and, yearning for her dead husband, invokes his spirit, which resides in the forest, across the darkness.

And What is the Summer Saying is set in Kondwall village in the state of Maharashtra, and focuses on its inhabitants and the surrounding flora and fauna. The camera roams through the jungle, going in and among the houses, searching for intimate stories and secrets. A young man goes out hunting for honey in the forest, the way his father taught him. We hear the story of the time a tiger appeared in the village. Meanwhile, trees rustle in the wind, smoke rises from the landscape and in the background we hear barking dogs and lowing cattle. A woman whispers, ‘People only sing, when they are in love with someone.’