As part of our Film & Documentary Screening series this month we bring to you documentary film Kho Ki Pa Lü / Up Down & Sideways by Anushka Meenakshi & Iswar Srikumar, followed by a brief discussion. Programmed by Vasudha Wantu.
“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. It is the first feature-length film from the u-ra-mi-li project, a larger body of work that looks at the connections between music and labour.
Duration: 83 minutes
Language: Chokri with English subtitles
Directors: 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.
Door:15:30 Film:16:00 Entry: £5 (donation optional)
