
2022
Musamoni never received schooling, and her early marriage brought her an early widowhood. Her anguish overflows as she sits down to narrate folklore and departure songs of the brides of patriarchy in the east of India.
Musamoni Panigrahi (1920s–2017), fondly called “Nani Ma” by her neighbours, appears in the centre of this first film in the Baleswari dialect of India's Odia language. The story revolves around folklore and folk songs narrated by Nani Ma. Born in the 1920s in pre-independent rural India in a coastal village in the Balasore district of Odisha, she never got to go beyond the first few days of school. The film is an alternate history of a society broken through colonization, Brahminical patriarchy and a post-famine (Orissa famine of 1866, killing nearly 5 million people, one-third of the population), and the dominance of formal writing over spoken tongues. Three academics -- Damayanti Beshra, PhD (recipient of India’s fourth civilian award, “Padma Shri”), Panchanan Mohanty, PhD (noted linguist), and Laxmikanta Tripathy, PhD, DLitt (anthropologist and author) -- also appear in the film to provide contextual commentary on patriarchy, oral history and the sociolinguistic diversity.

Musamoni Panigrahi
Self

Damayanti Beshra
(Self - Voice)

Laxmikanta Tripathy
(Self - Voice)

Panchanan Mohanty
(Self - Voice)

The Volunteer Archivists

Byaase Sunucha

Bringing Down a Mountain

Hakim Babu

Ananta

No Defense

Temple Grandin

Opouštět Petrohrad

Brezhnev

Love in the Walls

Torre 1

In Their Own Words: The Women of Kurokawa

The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?

Androcles and the Lion

Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson

Steve McQueen: The Essence of Cool

That's Entertainment!

The Magic of Fellini

Pitchmen

Cha Cha Charlie