Nakul Singh Sawhney

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Workshops, Residencies, Seminars, will create workshops for rural youth to practice non-fiction filmmaking skills that will empower them to tell their own stories, in the socio-political context of North India. Nakul Singh Sawhney is the Coordinator for this project. 

Nakul Singh Sawhney is an independent documentary filmmaker who divides his time between New Delhi and Western Uttar Pradesh. His films focus on issues of religious sectarianism and violence, human rights, gender, labour rights and social justice in South Asia. Nakul is also a founder of the film and media collective called ChalChitra Abhiyaan / Moving Images Campaign. Given Nakul’s experience he is best placed to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project will implement workshops on documentary filmmaking with adolescents and young adults in the age group of 13 to 25, at the film and media collective ChalChitra Abhiyaan. As a cultural centre, this has been a significant recreational and collective space for the local youth of Kandhla, a small township in Shamli district of Western Uttar Pradesh. The socio-political significance of the project is in training people from local marginalised communities to tell their own stories through videos, especially narratives that are discarded or misrepresented by the mainstream corporate media. It is the need of the hour, to equip citizens, especially the rural youth to express in their own voices, as an emancipatory act as well as a response to the vicious social media campaigns that function as hate machinery of fake news and fake videos. By empowering the marginalised communities as creators of narratives, the project will impart creative and technical skills in filmmaking to the rural youth, thus inverting the gaze of both documentary cinema and mass media. 

During the project period of six months, there will be two workshops of three months’ duration, with five to ten participants each. The workshops will begin by introducing the participants to various genres of Indian and international cinema. This is an important aspect of the project, as the youth in the area have seen only mainstream Hindi cinema and regional films of Khadi and Haryanvi dialects. Once the power and potential of film as a story-telling device is inculcated, the project will move on to introducing the youth to technical skills, ranging from camera, video editing, sound recording, and sound design. 

A trained camera professional will join the workshop to guide the participants in practicing various camera movements like panning and tilting, and various possibilities of magnifications. Following shooting, participants will be led to the editing table, to make them realise the mistakes they have made while doing the first schedule of shooting. Then the participants will be asked to shoot the same set of activities again, to learn from and overcome the mistakes that they had made. By the end of the workshops, each individual participant will make at least one short sequence that will capture their everyday lives, especially repetitive acts like making roti, which will provide ample opportunity to experiment with various camera angles and discover editing principles. 

The workshops will also impart skills, such as the basics of shooting an interview and the concepts of cut-aways, cut-ins, B-rolls etc. It is at this stage, that a professional sound recordist will accompany the cameraperson, to introduce them to the basics of sound recording - be it for interviews or ambient sounds. Subsequently, the participants will be encouraged to write short proposals or concept notes for short films that they want to make. The participants in each workshop will be divided into two groups, to encourage them to get involved in teamwork and to develop collaborative problem-solving skills for filmmaking. 

The outcomes of the project are the workshops, including the individual sequences prepared by each participant and the non-fiction short films that will be made by each group. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be photographs, audio-visual documentation of the workshops, the individual sequences, and the non-fiction short films.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the way it attempts to empower marginalised young people from rural areas to tell their own stories through documentary filmmaking, to fight the vicious hate machinery of social media’s fake news.   

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.

This project is made possible with support from Sony Pictures Entertainment Fund.