Director: Anjali Monteiro, K. P. Jayasankar

English (subtitled), 45 min, 2003, India

'Naata' is about Bhau Korde and Waqar Khan, two activists and friends, who have been involved in conflict resolution, working with neighbourhood peace committees in Dharavi, reputedly, the largest 'slum' in Asia.

Synopsis:

Friends and activists, Bhau Korde and Waqar Khan, work with neighborhood peace committees in Dharavi, Mumbai, to promote conflict resolution through the collective production and use of visual media. As Asia's largest slum, with a population of 800,000, Dharavi has often been represented as a breeding ground for filth, vice and poverty, full of immigrants whose right to live in the city is often questioned by vigilante citizens' groups and right-wing politicians. The film follows these remarkable men as they work on their film, Ekta Sandesh. The two pairs of filmmakers join forces in this documentary to spread their important message even further.

Producer: School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

Director: Anjali Monteiro, K. P. Jayasankar

Camera: K. P. Jayasankar

Editing: Anjali Monteiro, K. P. Jayasankar

Sound: Harikumar M.

About the Director:

Anjali Monteiro and K. P. Jayasankar are Professors at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Both of them are involved in documentary production, media teaching and research.

They have won thirty-two national and international awards for their documentary work. Their most recent award is the Basil Wright Prize for So Heddan So Hoddan (Like Here Like There) at the 13th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film, Edinburgh 2013. They have had 4 retrospectives of their films: Vibgyor Film Festival, Kerala 2006, Bangalore Film Society 2010, Madurai International Film Festival 2012 and Parramasala, Sydney 2013. An adaptation of their film Saacha (The Loom) was a part of the exhibition Project Space: Word. Sound. Power at the Tate Modern, London, between July and November 2013 and at Khoj, New Delhi in Jan-Feb 2014.

They have several papers in the area of media and cultural studies. They are both recipients of the Howard Thomas Memorial Fellowship in Media Studies at Goldsmith’s College, London and at the University of Western Sydney. They have been visiting Professors/scholars at the University of Lund, Sweden, University of California Berkeley, University of Bergen, Norway and at the University of Technology, Sydney.