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GENDER AND THE DOCUMENTARY
artistic research fellowships
Rough Edges, with support from the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, has instituted Subtext Artistic Research Fellowships that 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.
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Open to women, trans and queer researchers, artists and practitioners, the fellowships will involve research, enquiry, analysis and the creation of varied artistic material around the Indian documentary, from diverse locations. The outcomes would be as much about the making of new pieces and forms that amalgamate archival and original material, as offering critique, readings and commentaries on existing films and practices.​
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The following fellowships have been awarded:​​​
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​glances and stares: reading infrastructure in the documentary gaze
ansh/qabeer sharma
Anindya Shankar Das’ ‘Zara Nazar Utha ke Dekho’ begins with a provocation: “How do LGBTQ people recognise and approach each other? How do they communicate desire?” This mixed media essay, deliberately putting the film in a ‘messy’ dialogue with ethnographic encounters and archival fragments, will explore how ‘looking’ anchors cruising across film, city and archive. By ‘looking through’ the fragmented and fractured gazes of different sources, it will offer new registers of holding onto risk, gendered labour and spectatorship in documentary practice.
Ansh/Qabeer Sharma is a neurodivergent trans* researcher interested in discourse(s) of intimacy, infrastructure and digitality. Guided by anti-caste and crip-queer frameworks, she is passionate about collective care and institutional accountability. A postgraduate in Sociology from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, they were formerly a Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Gender & Sexuality, Ashoka University.
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​belonging elsewhere: faith, space and memory in muslim women's documentary filmmaking
nawa fatima and zoya fatima
​A video essay exploring belonging, identity and Muslim womanhood through three Delhi-based documentaries by women filmmakers, interwoven with the researchers’ memories from Bhagalpur and their independent lives in Delhi. A conversation across films, cities, generations and the shifting languages of home, searching for where Muslim women can finally belong.
Nawa Fatima is a PhD Research Scholar at the AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia. Her research examines how everyday creative practices and forms of digital labour take shape within contemporary digital platforms and their algorithmic infrastructures. Working at the intersection of new media studies, digital cultures, and affect theory, she explores how platform affordances shape visibility, participation, and engagement in online contexts.
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Zoya Fatima is pursuing her Master’s in Mass Communication at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia. Six years younger than Nawa, she offers a generationally distinct perspective on similar experiences of growing up as a Muslim girl in a small town and later navigating life in Delhi. For over five years, she has actively expressed her voice through her YouTube channel, where she discusses her everyday encounters and concerns, using digital spaces as platforms for self-representation.
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in-between archive and memory: women and queer film practices in film history
oshee johri
The Project will explore the fragile archival lives and circulation networks of feminist and queer documentary films in India. Through interviews, fieldwork and creative outputs, it examines alternative preservation practices, community-led screening ecologies and the gendered labour sustaining these films, imagining more inclusive and sustainable archival futures.
Oshee Johri is a filmmaker-scholar currently pursuing her Masters in Film Studies from English and Foreign Language University and is an Independent research fellow at Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute. She worked as researcher and Director’s Assistant for Nomadsfilmschool’s F(r)ICTION Cinema Camp - 1 and her film 'Work in Progress' won the Silver Bioscope at the Nagari Short Film Competition 2023. She has worked as Production and Editing Assistant, at FWI Media, Toronto,, and as Junior Writer, at Emmay Entertainment, Mumbai, after pursuing a Bachelor's in Screenwriting from TISS, Whistling Woods Mumbai Campus..
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decolonising the documentary gaze: adivasi women and self-representation
parul kunkal
As an Adivasi woman and aspiring filmmaker from Jharkhand, Parul seeks to examine two tribal women filmmakers’ works. Through their documentaries and other works, she will explore how these tribal women filmmakers, standing at the intersection of gender and indigeneity, achieve self-representation from within their communities. Her work aims to subvert cinema's dominant gaze, counter long-standing epistemic violence and centre tribal ontologies, applying decolonial theories to amplify indigenous voices and cultural truths.
Parul Kunkal is a media student and a Green Hub Central India Fellow. Her work sits at the intersection of indigenous storytelling, gender and documentary practice, with a focus on self-representation and decolonial narratives. She is currently working on a documentary on an adivasi conservationist for Roundglass Sustain.
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trans-queering the indian documentary scene
rini
An immersive mixed media installation that will integrate video work,
audio-visual components, archival material and participatory elements, centring the representation of trans subjectivity in Indian queer documentary films. It will combine projection-based video art, sound design, interactive media and collaborative audience-generated contributions, creating a multi-sensory and non-linear exhibition experience.
Rini is a visual artist-researcher, documentary filmmaker and video editor, currently based in Delhi. They pursued their Master's in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Their work engages with embodied knowledge, politics of negotiation and resistance practices/cultures. They aim to create critical, affective and politically engaged cinema grounded in lived realities. They have conducted academic research and professional video editing for The Polis Project, Hammock Magazine and Chambal Media. Their film ‘Sawari - The Passenger’, screened at Christ University. They are now working on a feature documentary on hijra femininity and the politics of desire.