Vikalp - Notes on man capture.jpg
City: Bombay
Location: Alliance Française Auditorium
Date: Mon, 2010/04/19 – 6:30pm
Category: Film screening

Chal Chaliye by Tanmay Agarwal:

Not the hour before, not a night before, but a comfortable fortnight before Shreya is to get married, Rudra is suddenly at her doorstep asking for love. The two step out of the house for a walk to the woods behind the suburb. They face and evade love in this beautiful dry garden, until the evening forces her to answer the question. Do they go together or do they part? The film is a relaxed study of the anxieties of the boy and the girl over the course of a day. They try to recede further and further into a private space out in the public, to find the answer to the eternal question, “Why do we keep saying no, when we want to say yes?”

Notes On Man Capture by Nandini Bedi:

To capture a man, then immediately marry him, you need a chicken. The Garo Hills, an extension of the Eastern Himalayas. When the cotton is in bloom, it is the season for man capture. Men from one village capture men from another for marriage to their unmarried sisters, cousins and nieces. If a man accepts the marriage, he moves into the village of his wife and shares her property. And if he doesn’t? Ratmi, a young, single mother wants to get married. The film follows the process of capturing a man for her as it observes the players behind Ratmi’s marriage in 2000/2001 and again in 2006. As we follow Ratmi’s story, some questions emerge for us. What does India look like as it is in some types of unseen fringes, where power shifts back and forth from individual to group, man to woman, the person behind the camera and the people in front of it? This film about the India that we don’t see, reverses some of the dominant images we see all the time about caste, gender and class differences.