Film Screenings
Every Time You Tell a Story
Ruchika Negi, Amit Mahanti
A still from Every Time You Tell A Story. Courtesy of Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti.
How do you tell a story whose words are a song, a stone, an image, or a symbol? A story that is woven into a shawl, woven through time itself?
Every Time You Tell A Story by Ruchika Negi and Amit Mahanti offers an interpretation of history, a way of understanding the shifts that Tsungkotepsu, the shawl-making tradition, has experienced when confronted with the certitudes of history — early colonial anthropology, new religion, and assimilation within the Indian State. The film explores the tension between historical currents and oral, visual knowledge systems like Tsungkotepsu, while also reflecting on the politics of gaze and representation that the Naga people and their cultures have encountered over time. How do the stories that have written themselves onto the fabric of the shawl through these histories continue to resonate today?
This film screening has been curated under Living Cultures, MAP’s public programming theme for the quarter. Through this theme, we explore the practices and evolution of cultures: shaping identity, and representing beliefs, but also reimagined and revived by new encounters and changing contexts.
Ruchika Negi
Filmmaker, Educator, Visual Artist
Ruchika Negi is a filmmaker, educator, and visual artist with an interest in arts-based pedagogical practices. Some of her films include ‘Malegaon Times’, ‘Every Time You Tell A Story’ and ‘Two Autumns in Wyszogrod’. She has been awarded artistic residencies at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; PAV Centre for Contemporary Art, Turin and Khoj Studios, Delhi. She is also the recipient of the Charles Wallace Short Term Grant in 2016, and a Research and Documentation grant from the India Foundation for the Arts. Her works have been exhibited at various festivals and art platforms, the most recent being the Kochi Muziris Biennale, 2022-23. She has been teaching documentary cinema in various universities and informal spaces since 2015, and currently leads the Learning Lab, an arts-based pedagogical platform of the feminist think tank, The Third Eye.
Amit Mahanti
Filmmaker, Cinematographer, Editor
Amit Mahanti is a filmmaker, cinematographer and editor based in New Delhi. An alumnus of AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Centre (Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi), he has worked on films and video installations that explore questions of ecological transformation, culture and politics. His films include Every Time You Tell A Story, Scratches On Stone and Two Autumns in Wyszogród. He has been selected for art and film residency programmes at Khoj Studios, New Delhi; Parco Arte Vivente Experimental Centre of Contemporary Art, Turin; Kran Film, Brussels and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski, Warsaw. His works have been exhibited at various festivals and art platforms, most recently at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin (2022) and the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2022-23). Amit was a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Short-term Fellowship, in 2016.
