Filmed in the dense streets and neighborhoods of Ambedkar Nagar in New Delhi, Yeh Freedom Life (This Freedom Life) (2019, 70 min) tries to keep up with its protagonists, as they maneuver erratic and unpredictable love. One of them works at a local beauty parlour, the other runs the family kiosk at a crowded intersection. They are surrounded by a cacophonous city; they are both in love with other women. The film stays with them and their desire for ‘freedom lives’, outside society and family’s constant scrutiny and sanction. But this ‘freedom life’ also leaves them vulnerable to the precariousness of love, when it refuses such constraints.
Priya Sen & Nicolás Grandi‘s Faasla (2020, 50 min) is a conversation in epistolary form using video, an exchange over a distance of countries and time zones, and at the time of a global pandemic which has meant a sudden re-ordering of our lives as we knew it. “We speak of distances, of intimacies we can no longer access, of the state of suspended freedoms, of memory, images and sensations. Our bodies themselves have become receptacles of these uncertainties, the archives we have haphazardly been building over the years, are having to speak for us. Maybe this dialogue is between the archives themselves, what we have seen, what we see now.”
Priya Sen is a New Delhi based filmmaker and artist who works with nonfiction forms across film /video, sound and installation. Her films explore forms for tenuousness, ambiguity and un-settling, as modes of navigating urban lives and experience. Sen’s work has been presented at the Flaherty Seminar 2019, among other festivals and venues that include the BFI London Film Festival, Forum Expanded Berlinale, Bangalore Queer Fest, Experimenta, Images Festival Toronto and the Dharamshala International Film Festival.
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