Friday, November 11, 2022
6:00pm – 10:15pm
A film screening of Reason (2018, 218 minutes)
followed by a discussion with director Anand Patwardhan
Best Feature-Length Documentary, International Documentary Film Festival, Amsterdam 2018
https://sai.columbia.edu/events/film-screening-reason-director-anand-patwardhan
Between 2013 to 2017 men on motorcycles shot dead four prominent Indian rationalists. Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, a fighter against blind faith was killed while on his morning walk, rationalists Govind Pansare and Professor M.M Kalburgi were assassinated in 2015 and journalist Gauri Lankesh in 2017. All were non-violent opponents of upper-caste, right-wing Hindutva supremacists.
Half a century earlier Mahatma Gandhi had been gunned down by the same ideological mindset – a mindset that openly admired Adolph Hitler. The forces that killed Gandhi went underground for decades but never stopped proselytizing. Today they are in power lending impunity to hate crimes and lynchings against minorities and the poor. They evoke Religion and muscular “nationalism”, even as their corporate media and a world tilted to the right, acquiesces or applauds.
Vivek/Reason examines the rise of a myopic authoritarianism that threatens the world’s largest democracy. Its 8 chapters also bear witness to heroic acts of resistance in an epic battle that the world cannot afford to look away from.
“IDFA’s jury voted unanimously for Patwardhan’s film, praising its “epic storytelling of the rise of the far right in one of the most populated countries of this planet.” (Variety, November 21, 2018)
“In broad strokes, it is easy to see why this film is essential to present at an American festival, as it would be in a British, Brazilian, Russian, or Philippine one … the universality of its theme is achieved through an almost overwhelming immersion into the details, both broad and anecdotal, of the last five or so years in India.” (Daniel Kasman, MUBI, March 2019)
Time: 6:00pm – 10:15pm
Location: Lehman Auditorium, Room 202, Altshul Hall, Barnard College (entrance of 117th and Broadway)
Map of Barnard campus: https://barnard.edu/visit/campus-map
Schedule
6:00pm – 7:35pm: Part One (95 minutes)
7:35pm – 8:10pm: Intermission and Q&A with film director Anand Patwardhan
8:10pm – 10:15pm: Part Two (123 minutes)
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