Saacha is about a poet, a painter and a city. The poet is Narayan Surve, and the painter Sudhir Patwardhan. The city is the city of Mumbai (a.k.a. Bombay), the birth place of the Indian textile industry and the industrial working class. Both the protagonists have been a part of the left cultural movement in the city. Weaving together poetry and paintings with accounts of the artists and memories of the city, the film explores the modes and politics of representation, the relevance of art in the contemporary social milieu, the decline of the urban working class in an age of structural adjustment, the dilemmas of the left and the trade union movement and the changing face of a huge metropolis.

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.