Films

A new narrative has emerged in contemporary Kazakh cinema. Related to national identity and citizenship, it focuses on the day-to-day experience of ordinary citizens faced with economic struggle, an obstinate bureaucracy, and corrupt state officials. This presentation engages with this newly emergent narrative, which challenges conventional state-led imaginations of the Kazakh nation and national identity, propagated via big-budget historical epics, produced by state-led film studios and supported by the Ministry of Culture. This work highlights the ways in which cinema can create a site of dissent in an authoritarian regime, focusing particularly on the films of Adilkhan Yerzhanov, Serik Abishev and Zhanna Isabayeva.

Project Seventy is a work-in-progress interactive documentary that on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Indian independence will be constructed around seventy stories gathered from both Indian and British citizens, now mostly in their 80s and 90s, who lived through the Independence process. It will involve both sound and film recordings, and will build upon previous collaborative research with Catriona Child, daughter of Ursula Graham Bower, anthropologist, filmmaker and resistance fighter in the period of Japanese occupation of the Naga Hills in the 1940s. I have chosen the i-doc format for this project as it allows one to offer pathways through a series of non-linear connections between texts, stills and moving image. A central question will concern the nature of Anglo Indian identity, which is clearly far from uniform, as the population is now scattered across the globe.