Rough Edges facilitates multidisciplinary feminist cultural research, knowledge production, narrative building, archiving and education through creative documentary films and storytelling by women, trans and queer artists, especially those unheard and marginalised, as an essential and fundamental agent and catalyst of intersectional gender justice, solidarity and affirmative social change.
Website: www.roughedges.in
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imprints: gender | films | intersections
Films, stories and conversations that offer poignant explorations of a range of complex and interconnected gendered experiences, celebrating the diversities of our beings, our individual and collective desires, resistances and solidarities. Produced, mentored and developed under the Rough Edges Uncode Fellowships, distinct in form, approach and expression, they provoke reflections on the truths of our complicated existence; recognise the many textures of our experiences, the tyranny of persistent patriarchies, barriers and stereotypes, the vulnerabilities and interiorities of our beings, in interaction with our caste, class, religion and work, even as they engage with questions around film practice, the act of looking through the camera and finding and framing the everyday stories of women.
40 min | Hindi, Gujarati with English Subtitles | 2024
2. HUMARE BEECH MEIN (IN BETWEEN US) BY RAJKUMARI PRAJAPATI AND RUCHIKA NEGI
35 minutes | Hindi with English subtitles | 2023
A conversation between two women about making a film on caste. How does one show the ordinary, viscerally? How do you use the camera to reveal structures of power and, maybe, even take back some power for ourselves? How does image-making help us negotiate, question and reflect on our differences? And as documentarians, how do we film caste? What do we show? What do we hide? Who has access? Who refrains? Shot on mobile phone cameras in western Uttar Pradesh, the Film seeks to explore the positions of the two women, Rajkumari, a social activist from Lalitpur UP, and Ruchika, a documentary filmmaker and educator from New Delhi, within the stratified structure of caste.
3. MAKING SPACE BY NIKITA PARIKH
14 min | Hindi with English Subtitles | 2024
Alsana lives in a small, chaotic neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, cut off from the rest of the city by an 85 acre landfill on one side and a highway on the other. A room of one’s own is hard to come by, but Alsana has a corner where only her rules apply. It takes on different forms - each an expression of her inner life, at odds with the world. Meanwhile, Alsana’s drawings show signs of the society seeping in, as she grapples with her identity and conflicts closer to home.
4. PARI BY PRIYA SEN
31 minutes | Hindi with English subtitles | 2023
Pari attempts to describe an event in the days of Pari and Praveen, a violent rupture that allowed in a life held by desire and not duty. In this film, they recount their love story against the undertones and backdrop of threat and violence. The present is both fraught and romantic; the disruption of a past moment finds momentary comfort in recall; the future is hopeful.
34 min | Hindi and English with English Subtitles | 2024
Inside the walls of B25 is a sanctuary, where lives intersect, stories intertwine and people flourish. The film offers glimpses of these unconventional bonds and experiences, that reframe notions of home and belonging, while reflecting on queerness, love, chosen families, gender, violence, identity and freedom, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing india.
34 min | Gujarati and Hindi with English Subtitles | 2024
Umbro, the threshold of a home, is the liminal space that speaks to the lives of women, including the filmmaker's mother and her friends who live in the small town of Dhrangadhra in central Gujarat, India. The film explores joyful friendships among women, routinely dismissed and unsung - carrying in them moments of shared stories, solidarities, conflicts and, most of all, routine acts of resistance. Umbro attempts to locate these flights of desire in the everyday, while celebrating the women’s indomitable love for life, and each other.
