Films Screenings + Discussion by The Third Eye Learning Lab

The team of fourteen filmmakers—Arti Ahirwar, Ashraf Hussain, Rajkumari Ahirwar, Vikas Khatri, Tabassum Ansari, Kulsum Khatoon, Khushi Bano, Parmeshwar Mandrawaliya, Santra Chaurthiya, Rajkumari Prajapati, Manisha Chanda, Anita Sen, Rani Devi, Ajfarul Shaikh— are grassroots activists from an intersection of age, work, gender and caste histories, from districts in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Jharkhand.

They are a part of The Third Eye’s Learning Lab, an arts based pedagogical platform that works on co-creation processes to populate the mainstream digital universe with diverse voices in visual/textual/ aural forms.

Hansa Thapliyal is trained in film making from FTII, Pune. She has worked, in the past, with the everyday material of our lives to animate the screen, to make it feel more tactile. She works across forms of film, writing and doll making.

Khushi Bano works in Sadbhavana Trust, Lucknow. She has been part of The Third Eye’s Learning Lab for two years, learning narrative making through image, sound and text. Her piece ‘Khushi’s Roshni’, won the Best Short Film at the prestigious TOTO Awards by Toto Funds the Arts in 2024.

The Third Eye (TTE) is a feminist think tank that works on gender, sexuality, technology and education, and is powered by Nirantar’s three decades of work on feminist pedagogies and knowledge creation.  In its online presence, TTE is a bilingual publishing platform in English and Hindi. TTE’s offline avatar is a site of praxis for grassroots knowledge production, the Learning Lab.

Working in partnerships with grassroots organisations, community- based groups, cultural workers, research and policy think tanks, the Learning Lab uses arts- based pedagogical processes for embedded learning and co-creation.  The pedagogies push for expressions that are not merely documentations of existing realities, but to create ways of seeing, experiencing, and thinking that interrogate and challenge the self and how it’s embedded in the world. 

The Learning Lab is mentored by documentary filmmakers, podcasters, feminist researchers, and activists.