Gulabi Gang
- Tuesday, May 7, 2019 / 7:00 PM - 9:45 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: Sony 4K digital projection (96 Minutes - Hindi with English subtitles)
- With Nishtha Jain (director)
Gulabi Gang (2012) is set in the badlands of Bundelkhand in central India, a place of dust, oppression, and resistance. This film follows the Gulabi Gang, an unusual group of rural women led by the energetic and charismatic Sampat Pal. They travel long distances to fight for the rights of women and Dalits. Often they encounter apathy, corruption, and even ridicule. Sometimes whole villages connive against them to protect the perpetrators of violence. While we see Gulabi Gang members struggling against gender violence and state corruption, we also see the flip side: members getting sucked in by the trappings of their newfound power. Breaking away from the deep-rooted patriarchal structure is a challenge even for the most fearless among them. The film pulls us into the center of these blazing conflicts and uncovers a complex story about the nature of power itself.
Director Nishtha Jain joined moderator Bishnupriya Ghosh (English and Global Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion.
Biographies
Director Nishtha Jain
Nishtha Jain is an award-winning filmmaker based in Mumbai. She has directed several films including the critically-acclaimed documentaries City of Photos (2005) and Lakshmi and Me (2008). Her most recent film is the short fiction film Proof (2019). She is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and Jamia Mass Communication Research Centre, New Delhi. Jain is the recipient of two Indian National Film Awards and over twenty international and national awards for her films. Her newest projects include a documentary, a fiction script, and a multichannel video installation. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar attached to the University of Texas at Austin.
Moderator Bishnupriya Ghosh
Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies at UC Santa Barbara. After publishing two monographs, When Borne Across (Rutgers UP 2004) and Global Icons (Duke UP 2011), on the elite and popular cultures of globalization, in the last decade Ghosh has turned to contemporary modes of speculative knowledge. Her current projects are in this area: a co-edited collection with Bhaskar Sarkar, The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (forthcoming 2019) and a monograph titled The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, which spans comparative epidemic media in South Asia, South Africa, and the United States.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.