SAACHA (The Loom) English, 49 mins, 2001
Directors : K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro
Produced by
School of Media and Cultural Studies
Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Mumbai 400 088, India
Saacha is about a poet, a painter and a city. The poet is Narayan Surve, and the painter Sudhir Patwardhan. The city is the city of Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both the protagonists have been a part of the left cultural movement in the city. Weaving together poetry and paintings with accounts of the artists and memories of the city, the film explores the modes and politics of representation, the relevance of art in the contemporary social milieu, the decline of the urban working class in an age of structural adjustment, the dilemmas of the left and the trade union movement and the changing face of a huge metropolis.
Awards: Second Prize, New Delhi Video Forum, 2001.
“The first thing one notices about Saacha is the sensory qualities of the image. The life of the city is built up out of a multitude of small fragments, intimate moments, glimpses; and out of these moments of sensory experience the film weaves a fabric that has the texture and the rhythm of the city. Saacha is experienced as much as a love affair with the city as a documentary about the city.” by Anne Rutherford, ‘Buddhas made of ice and butter’: mimetic visuality, transience and the documentary image, Third Text, Volume 20 Issue 1 2006, Routledge
About the DirectorsAnjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar are Professors at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Both of them are involved in media production, teaching and research. Jointly, they have won twenty-one national and international awards for their films, including the Prix Futura Berlin 1995 Asia Prize for Identity and Best Documentary Award at the Three Continents International Festival of Documentaries, Venezuela. Their work has also been screened widely, at film festivals, on Indian and overseas television networks and at Universities and institutions across the world. They are both recipients of the Howard Thomas Memorial Fellowship in Media Studies, and have been attached to Goldsmith’s College, London, and the University of Western Sydney.
