intention

'Image Democracy' (working title)


an hour long documentary film
in development stage
waiting for finance
with cooperation & involment from Election Commission of India

a century old plate camera visits remote places in the country where no cameras have ever reached
in some remote high mountain land of Himachal, it's touched by an old lady, who is 120 years old and been photographed for the first time in her life

film follows the latest instrument of Indian democracy, the digital imaging device used by the election commission to prepare the election photo identity card (EPIC) for the 60 million electorate of our country

we explore how the characters,
who had never seen a camera in their lives and getting photographed for the first time through the process of EPIC,
react to the ready-to-use-instant digital camera and also to the old plate camera where it takes at least five minutes to capture one still and a result which can never be seen instantly

we visit Malana, where they've been practicing democracy from the ancient times
a secretive village, a traditional and a very closed society, Malana expresses it's own language and understanding of democracy; the democracy of trust
they also produce some of the best hashish in the world

does the power of imaging help integrate these remote, far-from-our-kind-of-civilization people to the mainstream of so called Indian democracy

the film is not an evaluation of democracy which we've been fostering since independence sixty years ago, but a journey to explore some myths of world largest democracy, as it's been practiced in some remotest of places vis a vis the modern tech-savy urban civilization

'Art in the Age of Digital cloning' (working title)

in development stage
waiting for finance

in the digital world where every copy is a clone...

every reproduction is same as the original...

then at the end do we have a original!

lets go to the beginning and look for the original...

a century old plate camera takes photograph in this age when plate films has ceased exist, there's no reversal paper, all manual color labs have shut down...

imaging is no longer a chemical affair but reconstruction of a codified information...

a physicality of storage (negative/ transparecy/ print) is replaced by virtual spaces - free and unlimited...

a video documentary

a collection of images through the century old camera (exposed on photographic paper; no reproduction/ no cloning - one original)