In this episode, Ala’s Deepti Sreeram speaks with Sudha Padmaja Francis, an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker about her practice as a filmmaker and her documentary Ormajeevikal, a film that captures the city of Kozhikode through a community of music lovers
This is the fourth episode in Season 2 of Ala’s podcast series, focusing on modernity and Kerala. View all episodes here.
We Discuss:
- 03:30 – Collective memory and the importance of affect and mood in film-making.
- 07:30 – Placing Kozhikode’s unique Hindi film music within larger debates on culture in contemporary India.
- 10:30 – About memory-making and cinema.
- 17:00 – How gender and caste operate within the spaces documented in the film.
- 19:00 – Locating the female singers of Kozhikode.
- 21:00 – Navigating Kozhikode’s mehfils as a woman researcher.
- 25:10 – The “forgotten people” from Kozhikode’s musicscape.
- 26:00 – Ideas of “pure” and “impure” music in Kerala and across India
- 29:00 – How music shapes the way we look at a city like Kozhikode.
- 33:00 – Archiving parallel histories as an exercise in unsettling ideas of homogeneity.
About the Guests:
Sudha Padmaja Francis is a filmmaker/artist from Kerala, India. She graduated with a Masters in Creative Enterprise(Film) from the University of Reading, UK in September 2017. She completed her first short film in Malayalam titled Eye Test (2017) which won the National Award for Best Cinematography in 2017. Her second film, Ormajeevikal (Memory Beings), supported by PSBT- Doordarshan Fellowship (2018-2019), is based on the subaltern musical realm in North Kerala. It has screened at various international film festivals and has been shortlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award 2020.
Interview/Editing: Deepti Sreeram
Related Articles on Ala:
- Episode 2 of “Rethinking Keraleeyatha”, where we speak with historians Dilip Menon and Mahmood Kooria about the role of the Indian ocean in shaping the social and political history of Kerala, and revisit the limitations of a ‘terracentric’ idea of modernity and the nation-state.
- Irene explores what radio-listening practices of working-class Malayalis in the Gulf, and the inter-ethnic tensions they produce, tell us about migrant lifeworlds, longings, and labour.
