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The Wager on Cinema: Screening 2 – The Factory

1-The Wager on Cinema

The Sarai Programme invites you to the second screening of the film series titled, The Wager on Cinema: Rahul Roy’s The Factory‘.

The respondents for this film are Jeebesh Bagchi and Prabhu Mohapatra.

Date: 30 March, 2016
Time: 4PM (Tea will be served at 3:30PM)
Venue: The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29, Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi – 110054.

About ‘The Wager on Cinema’-
How do we estimate the value, aesthetic force, and meaning of cinema today? As media experience, technological change has transformed it beyond recognition, its material forms altered by analog and digital video formats, and the modes of circulating, viewing, accessing cinema and making it have expanded exponentially. And yet, the dream and ambition of cinema as we have known it has not dissipated, the desire to congregate audiences to participate in a distinct world of experience, whether to excite, amuse, to move or to solicit reflection and engagement, to bear witness and to mobilize.

For us at Sarai, the wager on cinema carries high stakes. It means renewing a pact with a bid to explore experience, to take film technique as a vehicle of the unexpected, making connections that take us aback, working out strategies to navigate media’s capacity to deceive – to sting the audience as much as expose secretive acts – through a forensic analytics, through ethical calibration, but also playfully, ironically. For us, such a wager also places emphasis on process, how things are done, how techniques are used, what evidence is presented, what judgments are made, how publics are engaged, framing the cinema as an act of research. In this series, Sarai will screen films to shift focus, to conjure up unusual images and sounds, novel techniques and subject matter, and will organise discussions with practitioners, researchers and an interested public to renew our investment in the cinema, to capture what it means in our times.

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Synopsis of ‘The Factory’ – Dir. Rahul Roy, 132 mins
147 workers of India’s biggest automobile manufacturing company Maruti Suzuki are on trial for the murder of a senior manager and 2500 workers dismissed. It has been two and a half years and the case drags on. Their bail application has been rejected by the courts. On each hearing they are led to the court room by the police while families line up to catch a glimpse. The defence lawyers plan their strategy in the court canteen. Justice seems a dim hope. The film follows the fate of the under trial workers, families and dismissed workers to investigate the underbelly of industrial conflict and the elusive nature of justice.

Rahul Roy is a filmmaker whose films have traveled across the globe to various documentary film festivals and have won several prestigious awards.

Jeebesh Bagchi is member of the Raqs Media Collective

Prabhu Mohapatra is a Historian at the University of Delhi.