Our Daughters Shall Inherit the Wealth of Our Stories: The Imaginactivism of Yugantar Film Collective

For the ninth collaboration with Forum Expanded, SAVVY Contemporary continues to explore what lies beyond the screen, this year by shifting their inquiry from a single filmmaker’s practice to processes of making films collectively. Tracing models of co-operation and self-organization among oppressed classes, castes, and communities, the exhibition OUR DAUGHTERS SHALL INHERIT THE WEALTH OF OUR STORIES performatively unpacks the practice of the first feminist film collective from India—Yugantar.

OUR DAUGHTERS SHALL INHERIT THE WEALTH OF OUR STORIES will manifest spatially in the form of a convivial cinema appreciation, exhibition and discursive space, that hosts films and people that resonate with the spirit of the collective alongside a constellation of stories, contextual information, and artistic resonances. SAVVY Contemporary welcomes Yugantar’s ecology of vision by accommodating further mediations and entanglements in a program that extends the duration of the films through other creative productions in performance, literature, theory, as well as in the reality of SAVVY’s neighborhood and the larger professional community of Berlin. Adding these lively dimensions, the exhibition animates this complex lineage to be a source of new propositions for a collective film making practice that strives towards relations based on equality across different backgrounds and perspectives.

Director Yugantar. Artistic Direction Renan Laru-an. Curation Abhishek Nilamber. Research Nicole Wolf. Production Hubert Gromny. Communikations Anna Jäger. Graphic Design Nancy Naser Al Deen. Tech Bert Günther.

The film collective Yugantar was founded by Deepa Dhanraj, Abha Bhaiya, Navroze Contractor, and Meera Rao in 1980. Between 1980 and 1983, during a time of radical political transformation in India, Yugantar created four pioneering films together with existing or ensuing women’s groups.

Films: 1981: Molkarin / Maid Servant (25 min.). 1982: Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali / Tobacco Ember (25 min.). 1983: Idhi Katha Matramena / Is This Just a Story? (25 min.), Sudesha.