Film Program: Glorious Things at Rice Cinema – March 23

Glorious Things web copy

 

 

Film Program: Glorious Things at Rice Cinema

Friday, March 22 | 6 PM
Saturday, March 23 | 4 and 6 PM

6100 Main Street Sewall Hall, Room 301
RSVP required. Free and open to the public.

Presented in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, Assistant Professor of Art at Rice University, and independent curator Michael Robinson, the FotoFest Biennial 2024 film program includes short films, artist videos, and feature-length films that reflect themes explored in the Biennial exhibitions Critical Geography and Ten by Ten: Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2022–23. Held over the course of the Biennial, the program features contemporary cinematic works by directors from around the globe. Tickets are required to attend all screenings.

FotoFest is pleased to co-present a two-day screening program curated by Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, Assistant professor of Art at Rice University, with support from the Humanities Research Center at Rice University and Rice Cinema. This program includes three recent films: We Have Not Come Here To Die (2018) by acclaimed filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj; Does Your House Have Lions? (2021) by Vishal Jugdeo and vqueeram; and the Cannes Film Festival award-winning A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) by Payal Kapadia. Each film vividly articulates the stakes of contemporary student politics in India, with issues of caste, class, gender, and sexuality at the fore. Working through friendships and weaving together multiple voices and video sources in essayistic and experimental modes, the films make sense of—and look back at—the university as a site of intensifying authoritarianism. Filmmakers will be virtually present for discussions after screenings.

The full program and RSVP links are available via the link below.

RSVP HERE

PROGRAM SCHEDULE:

Friday, 22 March, 2024
6 PM: Screening We Have Not Come Here To Die, 2018, by Deepa Dhanraj

Saturday, 23 March, 2024
4 PM: Screening Does Your House Have Lions?, 2021, by Vishal Jugdeo & vqueeram
5–6 PM: Break; dinner provided at Rice Welcome Center
6 PM: Screening A Night of Knowing Nothing, 2021, by Payal Kapadia

ABOUT THE FILMS AND FILMMAKERS

We Have Not Come Here To Die, 2018, Dir. Deepa Dhanraj

On January 17th 2016 a Dalit, Phd research scholar, and activist Rohith Vemula unable to bear the persecution from a partisan University administration and dominant caste Hindu supremacists hung himself in one of the most prestigious universities in India. His suicide note, which argued against the “value of a man being reduced to his immediate identity,” galvanized student politics in India. Over the last year, thousands of students all over the country have broken the silence around their experiences of caste discrimination in Universities and have started a powerful anti-caste movement. The film attempts to track this historic movement changing the conversation on caste in India.

Award-winning filmmaker and writer Deepa Dhanraj has been part of the women's movement in India since 1980. She was one of the founding members of Yugantar, a feminist film collective that made a series of films in the early 1980s documenting rural and urban women's movements for labor rights and autonomy. Focused on feminist politics, Deepa's extensive filmography spans three decades and subjects including population control programs in India, Muslim women's courts, the rise of Hindu majoritarianism, community efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, and more. She has a special interest in education and has worked closely with government schools to create pedagogy suited to problems faced by first-generation learners from Dalit and Adivasi communities.

Does Your House Have Lions?, 2021, Dir. Vishal Jugdeo & vqueeram

Does Your House Have Lions? is an experimental documentary by the Delhi-based poet vqueeram and Los Angeles-based artist Vishal Jugdeo, the latest iteration of their ongoing, transoceanic collaborative practice and friendship. Shot in Delhi, Bombay, and Goa, the film follows vqueeram and their housemates Dhiren Borisa, Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Andre Ling—friends, lovers, and co-conspirators in activism and survival—against a four-year backdrop of turbulent political developments throughout India.

Vishal Jugdeo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles who works with video, installation, performance, and sculpture to construct experimental approaches to narrative. Weaving together strategies from television, cinema, and theater, his work emphasizes the layers of mediation that influence how we understand the unfolding present. Jugdeo has exhibited widely including solo presentations at the ICA Philadelphia, MOCA, Commonwealth and Council and LAXART in Los Angeles, and at the Western Front, Vancouver. Commissioned works have been featured in Performa, New York, Made in LA at the Hammer Museum, and at the Witte De With Center for Contemporary Arts, Rotterdam. Jugdeo is an Assistant Professor and New Genres Area Head in the Department of Art at UCLA.

vqueeram is currently Visiting Faculty at the School of Culture and and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University, Delhi. They live and love in Delhi. 

A Night of Knowing Nothing, 2021, Dir. Payal Kapadia

Through fictional love letters found in a cupboard at the Film and Television Institute of India, we meet L, a film student writing to her estranged lover while he is away. Gradually, we’re immersed in the drastic changes taking place at the school and in the lives of young people across the country as they take to the streets to protest widespread discrimination.

In her multiple award-winning debut film, Payal Kapadia deftly merges reality with fiction, weaving together archival footage with student protest videos to create a vital tapestry of the personal and the political. With its dreamlike editing rhythms and a revelatory use of sound, A Night of Knowing Nothing is an essential document of contemporary India and a nostalgic look at youth fighting the injustice of their time.

Payal Kapadia is a Mumbai-based filmmaker and artist. She studies Film Direction at the Film & Television Insitute of India. She is a Berlinale Talents alumna and participated in 2019 at the Cinéfondation—Résidence du Festival de Cannes.
Her short films Afternoon Clouds and And What is the Summer Saying premiered respectively at the Cinéfondation and the Berlinale. Her first feature-length film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, was selected for Director’s Fortnight, Cannes 2021, where it won the Golden Eye Prize for Best Documentary. Her next project, All We Imagine As Light, which received support from CICLIC, Hubert Bals Fund & PJLF Arts Fund, is currently in development.

Learn more about the FotoFest Biennial 2024, its exhibitions, and programming at fotofest.org/fotofest-biennial-2024.

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