Event Details

Paromita Vohra’s Working Girls

Asia Society India in collaboration with the National Centre for the Performing Arts

Asia Society India centre, in collaboration with NCPA Mumbai, presents the premiere of Paromita Vohra’s documentary Working Girls in Mumbai this September.

Working Girls
Tamil, Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Malayalam, Telugu  with English subtitles (2 hrs 14m)

Working Girls is a bold new documentary uncovering the invisible labour of women across India – from domestic workers to dancers, sex workers to mothers, farmers to surrogates. Filmed in Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong, Latur, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad and Madurai. With wit, music, and heart, it challenges what we call “work”. It is directed by Paromita Vohra in collaboration with The Law of Social Reproduction Project.

Directors: Paromita Vohra
Concept: Prabha Kotiswaran
Camera: Avijit Mukul Kishore
Editing: Nishant Radhakrishnan, Sankalp Meshram
Sound: Achuth Sahadevan, Namshad Hameed, Rajesh Saseendran, Sneha Sundar and others
Music: Bonnie Chakraborty
Sound Mix: Gissy Michael

About the Director 
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, love, desire and popular culture and spans many forms including documentary, fiction, print, video and sound installation. Her work as director includes the path-breaking documentaries Unlimited Girls and Q2P as well as Partners in Crime, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Where’ Sandra, Cosmopolis:Two Tales of A City and A Woman’s Place; the television series Connected Hum Tum and several music videos. In 2015 she founded the path-breaking Agents of Ishq, a platform about sex, love and desire for Indians.

She has written the fiction feature Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) the play IshqiyaDharavi Ishtyle, the comic Priya’s Mirror and several documentaries. Her fiction and non-fiction have been widely published and her weekly column Paronormal Activity is in its 15th year.

Website: www.parodevipictures.com
Twitter – @parodevi
Instagram – @bombay.rosie

About the Laws of Social Reproduction Project
The Laws of Social Reproduction project hosted by the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, draws on feminist legal theory and interdisciplinary methodologies to study female reproductive labour, including unpaid domestic work as well as abject forms of labour performed by women outside of the institution of marriage and for the market, namely, sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy, egg donation, and paid domestic work. The project is conceived by the professor of law, Prabha Kotiswaran.

The project demonstrates the law’s key role in making invisible women’s reproductive labour in these sectors, while also comparing the differences in the law’s regulation of these apparently varied forms of labour. Ultimately, the project proposes a holistic understanding of reproductive labour towards engendering reform that can further economic justice for women.

The Laws of Social Reproduction project is generously funded by a 2017 European Research Council Consolidator Grant and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946).

Reviews
“What is most breathtaking is how Working Girls is steeped in the chutzpah of the women whose lives it follows. Right next to heartbreaks are also bonds of affection and the solidarity of sisterhood. In the thick of everyday struggles to survive, there were moments of exquisite pleasure: felt, expressed, witnessed in their bodies, their glances, their touch. Their wit and sense of irony compel us to re-examine not just what, but how we define the sacred and profane. The delicate camera movements, holding space for their personal and intimate moments, make the scenes particularly extraordinary.”

• Arundhati Ghosh, The News Minute

“To understand Working Girls is also to trace it back to Unlimited Girls, Vohra’s landmark 2002 documentary on feminism in urban India. That film upended the documentary form with a feminist chatroom, big ads and cool music. That openness, where feminist thought could be funny, complex, even romantic, has laid the foundation for her latest work. If the former foregrounded the feminist self, the latter roots that self in a web of economic, legal and caste realities. The journey from Unlimited Girls to Working Girls is a political one with unflinching gazes, collective spirit, spontaneous laughter and moments of solitude.”

• Prachi Satrawal, The New Indian Express

The film screenings will be followed by a discussion.
Free entry on a first-come-first-served basis. NCPA Members will get preferential seating.