Landless, a film by Randeep Maddoke | Film Night @ FICA Reading Room
18 July 2019 | 6 PM onwards

Duration: 1 hr 10 min
The film screening will be followed by the filmmaker in conversation with documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, and Koonal Duggal.

The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art invites you to the screening of Landless, a film by Randeep Maddoke. The 2018 documentary has received critical acclaim for the way it disrupts conventional understanding of caste and land relations. Set in Punjab, the film chronicles the struggles of landless Dalit labourers and the discrimination faced in their daily life.

Tapping into his own experiences of being born into a Dalit family of landless labourers in Punjab, Randeep’s work in photography and documentary film has had a long engagement with these lived experiences. Before joining the Government College of Art, Chandigarh, to study printmaking, he was as an activist in Khet Mazdoor Union (Agricultural Labour Union). His background in activism made him aware about the social and political issues that continue to reflect in the formal aesthetics and politics of his photography and filmmaking.  

Randeep Singh is a Photographer and Documentary Filmmaker currently teaching as Assistant Professor in Photography at Lovely Professional University, Punjab. He has done regular photojournalistic and freelance assignments for magazines and newspapers, such as, Haryana Review, Tehelka, The Times of India, Frontline, Indo-US Dialogue Magazine, etc. He has participated in various photography workshops, namely, “Aesthetics in photography” taught by the world renowned photographer Morten Krogvold in Kathmandu (Nepal), 2013. In 2014 and 2009, he held solo exhibitions titled Sculpted Moments and Chandigarh Through My Heart at Alliance Française de Chandigarh.  
Randeep’s feature length documentary film Landless was premiered at the 6th Udaipur Film Festival in Udaipur (Rajastan). It has been selected for screening for film festivals like the 6th Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF), organised by the People’s Film Collective, Kolkata (West Bengal) in January 2019; the 6th Gorakhpur Film Festival organised by the Cinema of Resistance, Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh) in January 2019; and the 2ndNagpur Film Festival organized by Cinema of Resistance, Nagpur (Maharashtra) in March 2019.  Through his work Randeep has also consistently engaged in photographing several social and political issues in Nepal since 2008. He has done detailed research and photography of Maoist movement and aftermath of earthquake (2015) in Nepal.

Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer whose recent work includes the films Red Ant Dream (2013) about the persistence of the revolutionary ideal in India, Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom, 2007) about the idea of freedom in Kashmir, and Words on Water (2002) about the struggle against the Narmada dams in central India.
In 2017 he published the photo-book, Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers under the independent imprint Yaarbal Books. He is the editor of the anthology Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir (2011). A self-taught filmmaker, he has been active with the documentary cinema movement in India. He lives in New Delhi, writes occasional political commentary, and reviews books that he is engaged by.

Koonal Duggal is an independent researcher. He completed his Masters in Art History and Aesthetics from M.S. University, Baroda (2008) and has a PhD in Cultural Studies from the EFLU, Hyderabad (2016). He had taught Art History at Jamia Millia Islamia and University of Hyderabad. Currently he is working on a project awarded by Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation and Asia Art Archive (SSAF-AAA) Grant for Histories of Ideas, Art Writing, and Visual Culture, for the project titled "At the Intersection of Narratology and Visuality: A Case Study of  Periodicals from the Communist Movement in Punjab (1960s-1990s).