In Person: The Golden Thread by Nishtha Jain
A solemn weaver treads through a mountain of jute threads to get to the end of the factory. Next to the humdrum of machinery that is about a century old, an exhausted worker nods off to the sound of the machines. Such scenes of work and rest, of relentless physical labour and tea breaks comprise Nishtha Jain’s documentary The Golden Thread (2022). The film, which premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam 2023, was screened as a part of the 12th Dharamshala International Film Festival.
The Golden Thread is set in the fast-disappearing jute mills located on the outskirts of Kolkata. It juxtaposes the irony of jute being heralded as a natural response to plastic products, given the lack of support for industries that produce it. The film centres the processual in minute detail throughout the narrative, from its opening shots that frame jute fibre flying around the workspace to the multiple shift changes where the camera follows workers as they take breaks, leave the factory and head home. The process of making jute is woven together with the process of constructing the film itself, collapsing the history of the mills and its bleak future through shots of centuries-old machinery that labours on. Beyond the confines of the factory and its rotational shifts, a cultural production around the work carries on in shots of songs sung about the conditions of work in the mills.
We meet young women who travel for hours to reach home from their shifts, only to immediately handle household work in preparation for the next day. A self-styled pandit provides a horoscope reading after a long, gruelling shift, working in his saffron robes. A group of young men lament the futility of pursuing higher education when there is a lack of monetary support, choosing instead to work early in the mills. Scenes of humanist vigour are interspersed within the constant soundscape of weaving, creaking machinery and consistent work, comprising the “warp and weft” of jute and the intricate fibre of the film itself. In this edited conversation, Jain elaborates on her process when filming the jute mills, the long history of the filming industry and worker-centric cinema and the continuous process of filming life and work for the documentary. The conversation was recorded on site at the Dharamshala Film Festival 2023.
Nishtha Jain, a Mumbai-based filmmaker, is renowned for documentaries like City of Photos (2004), Lakshmi and Me (2007) and Gulabi Gang (2014). Her films delve into the intersections of gender, caste and class, exploring personal politics and privilege mechanisms. She was awarded the Chicken & Egg Award (2020), AMPAS membership and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship (2019) for her films. Trained at Jamia Millia Islamia’s Mass Communication Research Centre and the Film and Television Institute of India, she works across documentary, narrative, virtual reality and TV.
(Featured image: Still from The Golden Thread [2022] by Nishtha Jain. Image courtesy of the director and the Dharamshala International Film Festival.)
(Recorded on 7 November 2023)
To learn more about non-fiction films screened at DIFF, read Annalisa Mansukhani’s essay on the poetic language in Bawa’s Garden (2022) by Clara Kraft Isono and Mallika Visvanathan’s reading of historical memory in personal and political narratives as portrayed in The Mother of All Lies (2023) by Asmae El Moudir.
To read more about the representation of the lives of mill workers, revisit Arushi Vats’ two part essay on Jan Breman and Parthiv Shah’s book Working in the Mill No More (2004).
