National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Bengaluru, in collaboration with Bangalore Film Society and Just Femme present the inaugural edition of pEtE maatu. The three-day event will comprise an international film festival of short films and documentaries, a digital photo exhibition and panel discussion on the theme Women and the City.

There are many things for which a woman steps outside her house in a city — be it to go to work, or drop a child to school, meet friends, or go grocery shopping. What happens when she steps out? Does she feel safe; what kind of hurdles does she face; how does she deal with eve-teasing?

Events

1. Film Festival and Digital Photo Exhibition

Date: Dec 17-19, 2010
Time: 11.30 am to 7 pm
Venue: NGMA, No. 49, Manikyavelu Mansion, Palace Road,  Bangalore-560 052

2. Panel Discussion
(In partnership with Citizen Matters, Bangalore’s own interactive newsmagazine)

Date: Dec 18, 2010
Time: 4 pm
Venue: NGMA, No. 49, Manikyavelu Mansion, Palace Road, Bangalore-560 052
Topic: Making Bengaluru women-friendly
Listen to officials, citizens, activists, students. Share your experiences and propose ideas for a safer city.

For more details of the event visit  http://www.justfemme.in or mail us at petemaatu@gmail.com
Phone: 080-22342338 (NGMA), 080-25493705 (BFS), 9986170866 (JF)

National Gallery of Modern Art

The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) Bengaluru is one of the three NGMAs (the other two are in Delhi and Mumbai). NGMA comes under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

NGMA Bengaluru is housed in a gracious heritage building in an area of 3½ acres full of magnificent old trees and beautiful water bodies. Here one can admire more than 500 works of the most acclaimed masters of modern art in India, browse through beautiful books on art in the only free Art Reference Public Library in Bangalore or attend the varied performances and events which are organized regularly in the NGMA auditorium. Entry to the grounds of NGMA is open to all.

Besides the permanent collection on display, curated exhibitions are held at regular intervals. In April-May 2010, the NGMA showcased the water colour painting and drawing exhibition from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Indian Life and Landscapes. From January 23 2011, Bangaloreans can see another exciting exhibition from the V & A — Something That I’ll Never Really See: Contemporary Photography from the V&A. Along with the exhibition, parallel educational programmes are being organized.

Among the ongoing activities of the NGMA are film shows, talks, educational programmes for school children and gallery walks. There are regular gallery walks every Wednesday at 3 pm and Saturdays at 10.30 am. Besides this, there are special gallery walks. From December 12th at 3 pm the NGMA begins the special gallery walk on Sculpture in Indian Art.

Address: National Gallery of Modern Art, Bengaluru, No. 49, Palace Road, Bangalore-560 052. Phone No. 22342338, 22201027
Website : www.ngmaindia.gov.in
E-mail: ngma.bengaluru@gmail.com

Bangalore Film Society

Bangalore Film Society (BFS) is a 30-year-old film movement comprising like-minded film enthusiasts committed to evolving a new perspective for film appreciation – an attempt which seeks to transcend the popular conceptions of cinematic entertainment from neutral, value free flights into the realism of the fantastic and the illusory to that of a purposeful voyage into terrains of the real and immediate concerns of human experience. In 30 years of active involvement, BFS has been instrumental in screening outstanding films of famous directors from various countries, initiating a process of intercultural dialogue and creating avenues for divergent aesthetic experience-films from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, American theatre Film series, to mention only a few.

Deep Focus is a film quarterly being brought out by the BFS, where it features critiques of cinema’s masters, socio-cultural and political significance of popular cinema, and writings on the generation of meanings through cinematic signs and so on.

BFS’s regular activities:

• Screening of feature films, short films, and documentaries from India and other countries.
• Conducting film festivals and retrospectives of outstanding film directors followed by symposia and discussion around films.
• Publishing film analyses on occasion.

Just Femme

http:///www.justfemme.in , an online magazine, is a part of Just Femme Media Initiative (JFMI). It is a three year old company set up to change the way women and women’s issues are looked at by the media and society. It discusses “All things women” with a balanced view — a wide range of issues from development, policies, legal issues to career. Just Femme uses multimedia (web, print, podcasts, and videos) to reach out to people and get them to talk about women’s issues and hope to find a lasting solution.

JFMI has conducted workshops in digital filmmaking, gender sensitisation and writing for media with a gender balance. It also works closely with NGOs working with women on process documentation, an area that is widely neglected due to lack of resources and expertise. JFMI works with these organisations in building their digital presence via short films and documentaries.

JustFemme has over 15,000 hits a month with 35,000 page views. Over 75% of the readers are from India and the rest are spread world-wide. We have trained over 500 individuals in filmmaking and writing for media.

Padmalatha Ravi, Savitha V and Sajana Jayaraj make up the trio behind the venture.

Citizen Matters

Citizen Matters is a Bangalore-focused online and print newsmagazine, covering city public affairs, community and culture. Citizen Matters encourages citizens to get involved in city affairs.

At present, Citizen Matters online has roughly 45,000 visitors per month with about 75,000 pageviews. Majority of net visitors are from Bangalore. A major story we broke recently was on how the BBMP shutdown a call centre for whisteblowers on plan sanction violations in the city.

Citizen Matters in print is a free sleek fortnightly, with a glossy cover. It runs to 16,000 copies each issue and is distributed only in JP Nagar, BTM and a part of Jayanagar. 22 major apartments in that area are opt-in recipients of the free magazine, apart from independent homes. Over 150 local and city level businesses are advertising customers.

Citizen Matters is published by Oorvani Media Private Ltd., an independent local media firm founded by Bangaloreans Subramaniam Vincent and Meera K.

SCHEDULE

Day 1: Dec 17, 2010

Films and Digital photo exhibition

Digital Photo Exhibition “Women & the City” from 11.30 to 7 pm. Selected from hundreds of entries these images show glimpses of women’s everyday negotiations with the city.

Day 2: Dec 18, 2010

Films, Digital photo exhibition and Panel discussion

4 pm to 5.30pm – Panel discussion on “Making Bengaluru Women-Friendly”.

The Bangalorean panelists

Prakash Belawadi, is a well-known journalist, theatre enthusiast and a filmmaker from Bengaluru. “Among the most significant markers of a civilised society is that it is conscious and sensible to the female half of itself”, he says. Earlier this year, he ran for a Bengauru city council seat on the Lok Satta party ticket.

Mithila Jha, an Urban Planner, currently working with BMTC. Over the past two years, she has been involved in projects seeking to popularise the Volvo bus services. She holds a Masters degree in Urban Planning from MIT, Cambridge, USA. Her interests are in marketing public transport and make it more accessible and user friendly. 

C K Meena, long-time Bangalorean, known for witty columns on life in Bengaluru’s ever-changing cityscape, has written two books of fiction – the semi-autobiographical Black Lentil Doughnuts and the crime thriller Dreams for the Dying.

Deepika Nagabushan, a freelance photographer who likes to capture people and stories. As an active member of Bangalore Photography Club she was recently involved with Frames of Mind 2010, a photo exhibition. She is a marketing communication professional working with Schneider Electric.

Suneel Kumar (IPS), is Additional Commissioner of Police (Law & Order) for Bangalore. He will speak from the vantage of the state police and law enforcement.

Siri Srinivas, a gen-next sharpie, born and raised in Bengaluru, an engineer and working at a global financial major in the city.

Moderator

Vasanthi Hariprakash, is presently Special Correspondent at NDTV’s Bangalore bureau and an award winning RJ and journalist. She has 16 years of media experience that spans across print, radio, online and visual media. 

The panelists will be asked by the moderator to respond with their views on whether the city is friendly or not for women and why, from three vantage points: Transport, public spaces and the ‘local vs outsider’ factor.

Day 3: Dec 19, 2010

Films and Digital photo exhibition

SYNOPSES OF FILMS

The Women’s Kingdom
Dir: Xiaoli Zhou
Time: 22 min

Keepers of one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, Mosuo women in a remote area of southwest China live beyond the strictures of mainstream Chinese culture – enjoying great freedoms and carrying heavy responsibilities. Beautifully shot and featuring intimate interviews, this short documentary offers a rare glimpse into a society virtually unheard of 10 years ago and now often misrepresented in the media.

Remembrance of Things Present
Dir: Chandra Siddan
Time:  80min

Chandra Siddan, a Canadian immigrant, returns to Bangalore, India after 12 years absence with these questions.  Long divorced and newly remarried, she enquires into the reasons for her early first marriage arranged in the mid 70s by her Hindu urban middle class family and confronts her parents and relatives with her lost childhood while also presenting them her new husband. Reuniting with her daughter, Smruthi, (now in her twenties) Chandra finds her refreshingly liberated. But the life of her parents’ teenage servant, Sudha, shows that that the past is anything but over.

The Mall on Top of my House
Dir: Aditi Chitre
Time: 6min

An animation film that deals with the issue of rampant land reclamation by the flouting of  environmental laws and the consequent displacement of the fishing community. The film narrates the story of a fisherman living in a dark underground tunnel, constantly negotiating with the chaos of traffic, fancy malls, luxury housing etc built on land that was once his. With builders taking ever increasing chunks of the city’s open space, the fisherman is finally driven out even from his dingy tunnel to make way for more development.

Q2P
Dir: Paromita Vohra
Time: 53min

As Q2P peers through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets in Bombay with a small detour in Delhi, watching who has to queue to pee, we begin to see the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; the small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions – about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.

Printed Rainbow
Dir: Gitanjali Rao
Time: 15min

A big city. A tiny apartment.  An old woman and her cat live there in solitude, stuck in daily chores against the bustle of the city. The windows look out into more windows, into even more desolate lives. The old woman, however, has a secret window: her precious collection of match boxes. Their printed labels open into a myriad of exotic worlds. The cat is the sole companion in her explorations of these magical worlds where beauty, imagination and wonder triumph over the insignificance of her existence.

Morality TV aur Loving Jihad- Ek Manohar Kahani
Dir: Paromita Vohra
Time: 30min

The film seeks to understand the impact of the language of “exposes” and breaking news, the language of desire and surveillance in the backdrop of Operation Majnu where police officers attacked about 30 couples sitting in a Meerut park for “moral turpitude” which the media covered extensively.

Two Lives
Dir: Samina Mishra
Time: 30min

Smriti and Rupa live an hour away from each other but the only thing their worlds seem to have in common is that they are both mothers. Smriti is a stay at home mom, living in a posh South Delhi colony and Rupa is a domestic worker living in a basti in Gurgaon. Both are pregnant and as they wait for their babies to be born, they reflect on what it means to be a mother. As new worlds open up for women and old roles persist, the film looks at how women enact motherhood in our times.

A Short Film About
Dir: Divya Sachar
Time: 30min

A look at how some urban Indian women view their breasts. Affected by other’s perceptions, women mostly find themselves looking at their breasts through a male perspective. Whether in the form of media images of impossible perfection or an adolescent need to gain male approval and attention or just the opposite – to repel male advances – the male gaze is ever present in one form or the other.

On My Own
Dir: Anu Srinivasan
Time:30min

Five single young women share their experiences of living on their own in Delhi as they justify their decisions to their families, come to terms with their own loneliness, and also discover some things about themselves.

To Think Like A Woman
Dir: Arpita Sinha
Time: 30min

The film reflects on the numerous silences that shroud the lives of young, educated, ‘independent’, ‘modern’, single women in urban India . Conversations with four such women reveal the inner conflicts, dissonances and a crisis of identity.

The Fight To Dance
Dir: Anish Patel
Time: 30min

An observational documentary following the struggle of Mumbai’s dance bar community to overturn the Maharashtra state government’s ban on dance bars in 2005. The film is a positive tale of female empowerment and ‘informal’ leadership.

Beyond Women’s Stereotypes
Dir: Bindu Nair
Time: 30min

The film explores stereotypical images of women portrayed on Indian television by juxtaposing them against lived realities.

Where’s Sandra?
Dir: Paromita Vohra
Time: 18min

Who is Sandra? And if she’s from Bandra where is she? If you saw her would you know her? As you walk through Bandra past the rozedars buying food from Jeff’s, the college kids making the mochas last, the aunties haggling with the vegetable sellers, the biker boys on Bandstand, the commuters pouring out of the sunlit old station building you may well ask Where’s Sandra?

Inside Out

Dir: Shilpi Gulati & Divya Cowasji

Time: 26min

The film ‘Inside Out’ was born out of the angst that even in the 21st century, in a city as liberal and safe as Mumbai, women’s access to public space is limited and largely relegated to the sphere of purposefulness. It is essential that in a cosmopolitan city women are out there, doing a certain kind of work, looking a certain way and almost always existing as consumers in markets or malls, caretakers for children in parks, or office going purposeful women. But what happens when one just wants to be? How thin is the line of acceptable conduct in public for a woman and what happens if one dares to cross it? Can one cross it at all? 

Jor Se Bol

Produced by Apna TV

Time: 17min

‘Jor se Bol’ was made by a team of young girls and boys who have witnessed and experienced sexual harassment closely. Through interviews with victims and perpetrators, the film and their young makers attempt to understand gender inequalities.

This is Delhi, My Love

Dir: Vani Subramanian

Time: 5min

A cinematic map that brings together first person narratives of violence experienced by women in the street of Delhi. As voices of the rich and the poor, the migrant and the marginalized, the young, the old and the transgendered layer over each other they create new composites of the multi-faceted nature of crimes against women.

1001 Auditions

Dir: Arun Singh

Time: 21min

After years of ups and downs, countless auditions and struggling to make it happen, Meera- once hailed as the ‘next big thing’ is finally giving up. Follow Meera on the last day of her auditions where she runs the gauntlet until at night a childhood memory reminds her to fulfill her dreams.

Hai Dupatta

Dir: Tess Joseph

Time: 30min

The stole or dupatta has long been a symbol of modesty. With the changing times and the changing face of women, this piece of cloth has given reason to both, conform and protest. The film tries to unravel what the stole means to young people and capture moments of violation and prejudices.

Is it just a Game? 2

Dir: Shakuntala Kulkarni

Time: 3min

Kabaddi is a game I played as a young girl. It is a game played with innocence, for pure fun and joy. Now as a grown up I play the same game in the film to address and challenge issues of power verses victimization, violence and viciousness within the politics of gender, caste, race, the world over.

Is it just a Game? 3

Dir: Shakuntala Kulkarni

Time: 3min

‘The Trust Game’ is a game I played as a young girl. It is a game played with innocence, for pure fun and joy. Now as a grown-up I play the same game in the film to address and challenge issues of power verses victimization, violence and viciousness within the politics of gender, caste, race, the world over.

Inclusion

Dir: Salil Chaturvedi

Time: 1min

This short humourous animation film looks at the serious subject of accessibility and equal rights for all by showing how a ramp may be used by different people in different ways, thus making the point that an inclusive society benefits all.

City of Guilt

Dir: Robin Barnwell & Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Time: 25min

In the next 30 years the population of the Philippines is set to double to 170 million. Contraceptives are frowned on and abortion is illegal, but as the film reveals, every year more than half a million Filipina women are so desperate that they undergo harrowing illegal abortions, despite the fact that at least 80,000 end up seriously ill in hospital. City of Guilt examines the fraught and anxious reality of abortion for women in the Philippines, and the conflict over rights that it has brought on.

Shape of Water

Dir: Kum-Kum Bhavani

Time: 70min

The ‘Shape of Water’ is a feature documentary that tells the stories of powerful, imaginative and visionary women confronting the destructive development of the Third World with new cultures and a passion for change. The film takes us to Senegal, Israel/Palestine, Brazil, and India where these new cultures, alongside old traditions, end female genital cutting (FGC), offer innovative forms of opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and show how women are spearheading the implementation of renewable resources and rainforest preservation by tapping trees to obtain rubber.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Dir: Mike Leigh

Time: 118min

A Mike Leigh comedy, “Happy-Go-Lucky” is set in contemporary London and follows the adventures of Poppy (Sally Hawkins) a primary school teacher. A free spirit, she is open and generous – as funny and anarchic as she is focused and responsible. Lead actress Sally Hawkins won the Silver Bear and the Golden Globe, the film swept the National Society of Film Critics, USA awards and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for the Academy Awards 2009.

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