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RAI FILM Festival takes place on 27-30 March 2025. Learn more.

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2019

Up Down & Sideways

Directed by Anushka Meenakshi, Iswar Srikumar

2017 – 83'

Synopsis

We are delighted to screen Up Down and Sideways, the winner of the Ethnomusicology Film Award 2019, which is presented in collaboration with the British Forum of Ethnomusicology.

Almost all of the 5000 inhabitants of the village of Phek in Nagaland, India (close to the border with Myanmar) cultivate rice for their own consumption. As they work in cooperative groups, the rice cultivators of Phek sing. The seasons change, and so does the music, transforming the mundane into the hypnotic. The love that they sing of is also a metaphor for the need for the other – the friend, the family, the community, to build a polyphony of voices. Stories of love, stories of the field, stories of song, stories in song. Up, Down and Sideways is a musical portrait of a community of rice cultivators and their memories of love and loss, created from working together on the fields.

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RAI FILM Festival 2025

The next RAI FILM Festival will take place in person from 27-30 March 2025 at the Watershed Cinema and the Arnolfini International Centre for Contemporary Arts in Bristol (UK) and online throughout the month of April 2025.