Shobhit Jain
Shobhit Jain is a filmmaker based in India. He holds a post graduate Diploma in Cinema from Film & Television Institute of India (1992). He is the founder & Director of SPS Community Media, a grass-roots initiative for water and livelihood security, based out of a remote tribal village in Madhya Pradesh since 1990. It is a full-time in-house production unit that came up in 2008, articulating all SPS endeavours, translating ideas, practices and knowledge into films and other media contents in a dynamic, interactive process, in partnership with the local community. Its core team comprises local people of the area who have been trained to make films in local languages reflecting local milieu. The media content etch stories towards change, which are shared within the community through People’s Mobile Cinema—over 100 interactive sessions take place every month. More than 200 films—social documentaries, community videos and training films—have been produced so far. These films have also been screened in many national and international film festivals and received multiple awards.
This screening will be accompanied with an in person conversation with Camara Taylor (suspiration!) and will take place at The Maltings in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
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Hailstorm is based in the Narmada valley in central India, an area with extremely low levels of groundwater. Farmers here battle for survival, pitched against the vagaries of climate change. Following the events of a freak hailstorm over four seasons, the film unfolds the vulnerability and precarity of those that are at the sharpest end of global capitalism’s rapacious greed and the furthest from its benefits. —Jemma Desai
This collection of short form work by the Cambodian filmmakers associated with the production company Anti-Archive shows the breadth and quality of their filmmaking.
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Rock Bottom Riser is an immersive, exploratory and deeply inquisitive study of an island world at sea. The film fashions a layered and heterogeneous portrait of Hawaii through its cosmogony, its uncertain future and the scattered lens of the present. Through a combination of research, observation of the islands’ landscape and conversation with many different people who call it home, artist-filmmaker Fern Silva highlights the complexity and contradictions of a place which can be understood as beautiful and serene but also under constant existential threat.