foregrounding the untold and the obscured
Rough Edges and Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation have instituted Documentary Film Fellowships 2025-26 that seek to support artistic research, experiments with form and practice and the crafting of compelling and evocative films that give expression to innovative ideas and
enquiries, offering invigorating readings of diverse and complex lived realities, with nuance, depth and texture.
The Fellowships, open to women, trans and queer artists, will support three projects to explore the theme The Other Side, through feminist enquiries, narratives, speculations and reflections on alternative, different, unconventional, unheard and neglected experiences, realities, connections, forms of knowledge, histories, livelihoods, beliefs, practices and routines of life and living. āā
The Films will explore how these stories and experiences, individual and collective, challenging and liberating, across myriad locations, shifting contexts and solidarities, can find form, language and creative expression, even as they challenge mainstream and exclusionary understandings, boundaries and assumptions. How they can stake claim to being spoken about, chronicled and even being reimagined, reframed and resurrected.
The Jury comprised Professor Sabeena Gadihoke as independent juror and Teams Rough Edges and MMF.
The Fellowships have been awarded to:
Aiswarya P Raj for Beyond Cancer
Through her mother’s recovery from breast cancer and the lives of other women, the Film will explore the other side of illness: the overlooked ordinaries of survival. Beyond tragedy or triumph, it will reveal caregiving, bodily negotiations, silences and small joys, creating a collective portrait that is both intimate and social.
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Aiswarya is a researcher and filmmaker from Kerala. She holds a Master's in Society and Culture from IIT Gandhinagar and is currently pursuing a Diploma in filmmaking at New Wave Film School, Calicut. Her practice moves between research and creative work, drawing from visual anthropology to craft films that weave together memory, everyday life and women’s labour. She has previously worked at the Centre for Public Policy Research, Kochi, where she contributed to drafting the Kerala State Film Policy in collaboration with the State Film Development Corporation. Shaped by her interest in the intimate and the ordinary, Aiswarya uses personal narratives to raise larger social questions, exploring resilience, gender and the politics of representation through visual storytelling. ā
Manas for Musa Majzoob
15th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Musa Suhag migrated from Rajasthan to Ahmedabad, transitioning into gender-queer beinghood while living with the hijra community. Dying in pursuit of divine love as a majzoob, their dargah remains in a historic cemetery. Through trans-narratives and community memory, the Film will explore existential love and spiritual transcendence, from medieval to present-day Gujarat.ā
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Manas is an artist and social work practitioner from Ahmedabad, currently with the ELICIT Foundation as Program Lead, working with teachers in conflict impacted regions, particularly in rural South Kashmir. They have a background in film, community radio, media and communications, broadcasting, production, creative direction, writing, teaching and art. He is trained in print and digital mass communication, environmental science and law, radio jockeying, audio production and broadcast, yoga, various hand-based (analog) art forms, mental health through narrative practices and teacher coaching. Their myriad experiences strengthen their belief that working with people is the cornerstone of development.ā
āSuraiya Abu for The Pilgrim Women of Malabar
The Film will explore the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca undertaken by Muslim women from Malabar, tracing how waiting, devotion and memory shape their spiritual journeys. Through archival materials, oral testimonies and hand-drawn animation, it will reimagine documentary as an intimate archive — evoking the sacred, transnational dimensions of women’s mobility and faith.ā
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Suraiya is an independent video artist whose work explores the intersections of piety, imagination and memory. Her practice is animated by an interest in how visual culture attempts to mediate, translate spiritual experience into artistic forms. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Delhi and an M.A. in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. In 2021, she created Places, Prayers, and Piety, a video artwork that began with the prayer mat as a quotidian religious object and expanded into a meditation on prayer spaces and their trans-geographical resonance. Alongside video, she is drawn to animation as a medium to play, to give form to the world she sees and imagines.
The Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation (MMF) is a visual arts non-profit established in accordance with the vision of artist Mrinalini Mukherjee, to carry forth the legacy of the Mukherjee family which include her parents, the critically acclaimed modernist Benode Behari Mukherjee and artist-educator Leela Mukherjee. Their legacy, in the form of their archives, has been digitised and is shared with new audiences through curatorial and publishing initiatives. As a charitable organisation, MMF also supports visual art practitioners, scholars, students and builds strategic partnerships with other cultural institutions to grow the art ecosystem in India in equitable ways.