Anjana Sekar and Balaji Maheshwar

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate research towards the creation of a series of episodes for an audio-visual podcast, exploring the presence and location of class, caste, gender, and influence of mainstream politics in Tamil cinema. Based on the collection of Tamil cinema reviews in Periodical publications from 1930s - 1990s at The Cinema Resource Centre (TCRC), this project will explore the film reviews to understand the presence and significance that caste, gender, class and mainstream politics played in Tamil films. This project is a collaboration with The Cinema Resource Centre in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. TCRC a not-for-profit public archive of Indian cinema, designed to enable research on the visual and audio-visual cultural artefacts produced by Indian films, especially those made in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. The collection at TCRC ranges from film posters, lobby cards, song books, long-playing (LP) records, literature and review pieces on cinema, and thousands of film stills. Anjana Sekar and Balaji Maheshwar are the Coordinators for this project.

Anjana Sekar has a Master’s degree in Communications and has worked as a journalist with The Hindu and The News Minute. As a journalist she has extensively written on cinema, culture, arts, history, food, and environment. She also extends her practice as a writer to produce research-based writings as well as fiction and translation work. Balaji Maheshwar is a documentary photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker from Chennai. He was one of the participants from Asia for the Angkor Photo Workshop, 2019 and was mentored by Antoine D’agata and Sohrab Hura. He has exhibited his work in Chennai Photo Biennale 2016 and 2019. Balaji’s ongoing work Dear Cinema, was selected in Doc Edge Kolkata and Dhaka Doc Lab, 2023. Given both of their expertise and experience in writing, film and photography, Anjana and Balaji are best suited to be the Project Coordinators for this Foundation Project of IFA.

By studying the collection of Tamil cinema reviews in periodical publications from 1930s - 1990s at TCRC, this Foundation Project intends to reimagine the art of reviewing a film using today’s understanding of the medium. A close engagement with TCRC’s archives of Tamil cinema reviews along with a multi-pronged approach will bring forth a deeper understanding into the various cultural nuances of caste, class, gender and politics embedded in cinema through a multi-episode podcast. Keeping in mind the programmatic impulse of the Archives and Museums programme, the Coordinators will also organise a series of workshops for the public, creating an opportunity for them to interact with the archival materials. Through discussions and writing workshops, they will facilitate discourse on film-watching and the art of writing on films. As a parallel process, Anajana and Balaji will also generate research-based, short form content on the history of Tamil cinema and film reviews for social media and translate selected reviews from the collection for the TCRC blog.

Anjana and Balaji have divided the one year project term into seven phases. Starting from – collecting material for the podcast and the workshop from the archives during the first four months, along with blogging and creating content for social media; followed by developing the script for the podcast episodes and charting out plans for production. Simultaneously, they will prepare and curate the modules for the workshop. The first episode of the podcast will be launched at the interim period followed by a workshop for the students. The next few months will be dedicated to plan more workshops and pre and post production of the podcast episodes.

The outcomes of this project will be seven episodes for an audiovisual podcast, research-based materials for social media, blog posts and public workshops. The Project Coordinators’ final deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be the audio-visual recordings of the podcast, the final script of the episodes, content on social media, materials uploaded on the blog and documentation of the workshops.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.