OUR DAUGHTERS SHALL INHERIT THE WEALTH OF OUR STORIES.

The Imaginactivism of Yugantar Film Collective

For the eighth collaboration with Forum Expanded, SAVVY Contemporary continues to explore what lies beyond the screen by shifting our inquiry from one filmmaker’s practice to processes of making films collectively. We take cues from social, feminist, ecological, aesthetic and political movements that rethought the models of organising around that which concerns them.

Tracing models of co-operations and self-organisations among oppressed classes, castes and communities, the exhibition Our Daughters Shall Inherit The Wealth Of Our Stories performatively unpacks the practice of the first feminist film collective from India – the Yugantar Film Collective. Yugantar emerged from one of the great post-colonial socio-political strife: “Emergency” was a period of political repression from 1975 to 1977 imposed by then prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi. This period saw students, activists, artists, thinkers and doers come together to rethink a new vision for the society through and after 21 months of extra-judicial encroachment of people’s rights, expressions and existence. Yugantar embodied this spirit in their film making as well as screening practices. Founded by Abha Bhaiya, Deepa Dhanraj, Meera Rao and Navroze Contractor in 1980, Yugantar’s practice spanned across three years in multiple forms of activisms, but the most notable were the films that were made with the intention of creating a social dialogue about themes of labor, gender, caste, class, ecology and their intersections. 

Through exhibition-making, the filmography of Yugantar Film Collective is distilled, deepened, and taken forward through a close look at the tools and methodologies of self-assertion, resistances and solidarities incorporated in the collective’s four films: Molkarin (1981), Tambaku Chaakila Oob Aali (1982), Idi Katha Maatramena (1983), and Sudesha (1983). Responding to the films’ discursive parameters and their material history, the exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary transforms the temporality of the documentaries into a spatial opportunity that allows contemporary access to the capacity of cinema in educating, articulating, consensus building and strategising together during the most uncertain conditions.

In this time of pandemic, war and oncoming economic depression, where centralised structures have failed to respond adequately to the problems of our world, we are inspired to look for alternative structures of organising. Here, Yugantar Film Collective’s method of working closely and laterally with the communities that they engaged in their cinematic oeuvre shines as a beacon to guide us how cinema itself can become a space of autonomy, decentrality and yet collectivity to respond to the challenges of our times.

Our Daughters Shall Inherit The Wealth Of Our Stories manifests spatially in the form of a convivial cinema appreciation, exhibition and discursive space, that hosts films and people that resonate with the spirit of the collective alongside a constellation of stories, contextual information, and artistic echoes. SAVVY Contemporary welcomes Yugantar’s ecology of vision by accommodating further mediations and entanglements in a program that extends the duration of the films through other creative productions in performance, literature, theory, as well as in the reality of SAVVY’s neighbourhood and the larger professional community of Berlin. Adding these lively dimensions, the exhibition animates this complex lineage to be a source of new propositions for a collective film making practice that strives towards relations based on equality across different backgrounds and perspectives. 

With this convivial format we aim to honour the work of the past and ongoing present by drawing inspiration, resources and references from the restored film material as well as the website yugantar.film which was realised within Archive außer sich, a project of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, in the frame of the cooperation The Whole Life: An Archive Project together with Haus der Kulturen der Welt. It is part of HKW’s project The New Alphabet, supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag.

Past iterations in collaboration with Berlinale Forum Expanded: