Activist Cinema and Print: In Conversation with Kasturi Basu of the People’s Film Collective
Recorded on 10 June 2022
Activist cinema has a long-standing tradition, where film is used as a means to induce political thought among its audience. As opposed to the purported passivity of mainstream, profit-driven cinema, activist films rely primarily on the potential of the media text to stir the conscience of the viewers. Filmmakers and partners Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee were driven by this impulse. In 2013, they founded the People’s Film Collective—an independent body that screens films every month in Kolkata, besides conducting an annual festival and a travelling theatre across protest sites and remote locations in West Bengal. The Collective emerged when the duo (along with a larger group of activists) screened a documentary on textile workers titled Occupation: Mill Worker (1996, directed by Anand Patwardhan) at a jute mill in Naihati, Bengal. They were struck by the effect the moving image had on the impoverished factory workers who found in the subjects a common class identity, and whose response drew from the film’s thematic affinity with their living conditions and prolonged fight for dues. Interested, thus, in the concept of cinema as a political medium (as established by geo-politically diverse Leftist movements in the past), the People’s Film Collective started travelling with portable equipment and arranged screenings for varied audiences, including children.
Basu and Banerjee believe that the independent documentary has the radical potential to disrupt the status quo, and have edited Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India (2018), a collection of essays and interviews on this theme. Against a landscape of increasing fascism in the country under the rule of the ethno-nationalist political outfit, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Collective organises discussions and publishes inexpensive booklets in Bengali on urgent socio-political concerns. They maintain their distance from both the state and the market, and rely on voluntary donations for sustenance to avoid any chances of censorship by vested agents.
In this conversation with Najrin Islam for ASAP Cast, Basu talks about the Collective’s curatorial decisions illuminating the many challenges faced by activist cinema, including the drive to work against institutional omissions and showcase work that is critical of the state.
(Featured Image: The eighth edition of the Kolkata People's Film Festival. Courtesy of the People's Film Collective.)
To read more about the work of Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee, please click here.
