Longen Folk To Go On Pilgrimage
Documentary
1.5 hrs
May 17, 2024 7:30 pm Friday
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This self-funded documentary is about what used to be a little known event until the 1980s but which has now become the single largest annual pilgrimage in India: the Kanwar Yatra. The film looks at not just the religious and cultural aspects of the Yatra but also its socio-economic impact, the environmental issues attached to it (for instance, the state of the Ganga and the potential for man-animal conflict, etc), the sheer maleness of the event, and how the occasion is being used by Hindu right-wing groups to push their majoritarian agenda and the showcase it has become for Hindu nationalism.

The nearly 90-minute film was shot over a period of six years and was an official selection at the 8th Kolkata People's Film Festival in 2022. The film has had a screening at Prithvi Theatre, Bombay, and over 35 universities across the world, including Princeton, Yale, Columbia and Stanford, have acquired it to screen/stream it for their students, faculty and staff.

Organizer
Kunal Vohra
Based in Delhi, I'm currently working on an ethnography film about a few Adivasi communities in the Koraput district of Orissa. Commissioned by professors at the University of Groningen and the Frobenius Institute, the film focuses on cereal cultures and agricultural practises. I've also just working on another self-funded documentary about what I like to call the side-effects of the politics of the last ten years in India.