Rough Edges, with support from the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, is delighted to announce its Subtext Artistic Research Fellowships that aim to facilitate in-depth and insightful explorations of myriad complex and intimate relationships and connections between gendered realities and varied forms of documentary film practice, storytelling, politics, histories and spectatorship. This is an opportunity to research and create material on the Indian documentary film, from the lens of gender.

We invite feminist enquiries, observations, interpretations, analyses and reflections on how aesthetic, emotional and political motivations, processes, engagements, outcomes and interactions of documentary films are fundamentally mediated by the intersectional experiences of gender. The impetus is to recognise, investigate and engage with how gender - as identity, embodiment, practice of life and politics, system of unequal power and cultural intervention, is implicit to the very imagination and materiality of films. It traverses the conceptual, creative, political, physical, affective and technical elements that give films life and form to the manner in which they are shaped by, respond to and impact the world in which they are visualised, produced, circulated and experienced.

Assertions of authorship, form, process and image-making have been significant to enlarging and reimagining the ideas and scope of documentary practices and their imprints, rejecting their historical appropriation and routines, bringing into the conversation new ways of doing and foregrounding marginalised and unacknowledged voices and narratives. They empower contemplations on documentary films as individual and collective experiences of cultural production, visibility, critique, resistance and allyship in and against inherently patriarchal, sexist, conservative, heteronormative and ableist cultures, challenging hierarchies and hegemonies of gaze and representation, as creators and audience. Focussing on varied historical and contemporary concerns, experiences, understandings and interventions by practitioners, of practice, distribution and viewership, we seek projects that will together provoke engagements with multiple concerns around aesthetics and politics, truth and reality, form and reflexivity, structural inequalities, representation, gaze, ethics, stereotypes, meaning-making, knowledge creation, collectivisation, censorship, citizenship, subversion and exciting artistic adventures.

Acknowledging the radical impact of feminist impulses and movements over time, and more lately queer rights movements, that have enriched documentary practice, visuality, sharing and outreach, while shifting the paradigms of power and knowledge, these Fellowships will contribute to feminist readings and recordings of multiple pasts, circumstances, promises, challenges and triumphs of the Indian documentary from the lens of gender. These could include, among others, examining, celebrating, problematising, framing and reclaiming developments and shifts over time; the contributions of filmmakers, activists, collectives and audiences; films and images that remain significant or become particularly relevant in the present moment; engagement with specific subjects and realities and how they challenge mainstream representation; inheritances that need to be preserved and those that need to be unlearnt or reconfigured; the role of the filmmaker behind, on and beyond the screen; experiences and memories of making; modes of collaborative doing and their complexities; the intimacy of the personal and the political; documentary as solidarity, as difference, as vulnerability, as archive; the blurring of boundaries between documentary and fiction; embeddedness in structures that dis/empower; demands of markets on makers and their images; technology; ways of looking at and listening to the tangible and the intangible and being alive to emergent directions for the future, as sites of expression, creation, emotion, dialogue, resistance and transformation in a gendered and unequal world.

The methodologies and outcomes of these Fellowships will be artistic expressions in mediums that best represent and articulate the Researcher-Artists’ learnings and analyses about the subtext of gender and documentary film in interaction - the inherent, the resisted, the constructed.