The Urban Lens Film Festival is a one-of-a-kind international film festival that brings together filmmakers, academics and urban practitioners to dialogue with each other on cinema and the urban experience. Curated by the IIHS Media Lab, the festival has presented 201 films from various genres from 40 countries in 37 languages.

The IIHS Urban Lens Film Festival was hosted online from 18-21 November 2021, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan and Institut Français.

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Paromita Chakravarti: ​​Dr. Paromita Chakravarti is Professor, Department of English, and has been the Director of the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, UK. She teaches Renaissance drama, women's writing, sexuality and film studies. She started one of the first Queer studies post graduate courses in India in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. Her work in the School of Women's Studies has focused on education and sexuality. She has led national and international projects on gender representation in school textbooks, sexuality education, women's higher education, homeless women, women in the Panchayati Raj and in Self Help groups as well as HIV positive women and children and sex workers. She has worked with the state and central governments, the Women's Commission (state and national) and government ministries of education, Panchayat and rural development and HIV control and Prevention Boards as well as with international universities on policy related to women's education, empowerment and heath. Dr. Chakravarti is also the founder member of the NGO “EbongAalaap” which works on critical pedagogies and serves as board member of "Anjali" a NGO which works on issues of mental health as well as "Ranan", a cultural organisation and an advisor and close associate of Durbar, a sex workers’ collective. She has been working for the last four years on a project on mobilizing single women in Darjeeling. Her book Women Contesting Culture was published in 2012. Her book on Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas was published by Routledge in 2018. Her book on Asian Shakespeare was published in 2020.

Neethi P: Neethi’s interests broadly pertain to globalisation and labour, with a focus on labour informality, analysing diverse informal sectors and their associated workers. Striving to understand the nuances of labour-management relations and everyday labour politics in these informal sectors, Neethi focuses on informality among women workers and also various forms of upcoming informal or alternative labour associations/organisations, and their unique labour response strategies.

Neethi’s research, for over a decade, has covered a wide variety of informal workers/sectors including garment, electronics, ports, home-based work, street vendors, and recently, municipal sanitation workers and sex workers. Her research encompasses issues such as labour-management relations, recruitment strategies, labour control mechanisms, labour response mechanisms, labour-technology relations, emerging forms of labour movements, and formation of alternative labour organisation/associations. While addressing these concerns, Neethi’s approach moves away from economic orthodoxy and borrows from sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic approaches. This allows her to bring out local variability and uneven contours in labour markets whilst charting the complex landscape in which contemporary labour lives, works, and negotiates.

At IIHS, she is involved in designing and carrying out research on various aspects of urban employment.

Moderator:

Gautam Bhan: Gautam Bhan is part of the School of Human Development at IIHS, Gautam teaches, researches and writes on the politics of urban poverty and inequality, urban and planning theory, housing, and identity and social practice. At IIHS, Gautam has taught under several programmes, including the Urban Fellows Programme, the Urban Practitioners Programme and the PWP-UD.

He anchors the role of IIHS as a National Resource Centre, with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation and is part of IIHS’ work in affordable housing policy and practice. His previous research has focused on displacement and resettlement of the urban poor in Delhi and his new work engages with regimes of urban welfare and social security, including work on urban health. He has been an active part of urban social movements on sexuality as well as housing rights and currently advises and trains governmental agencies at local, state and national levels on housing policy.

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