Anjali Monteiro

Anjali Monteiro

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Our Family 2007

Set in Tamilnadu, India, ‘Our Family’ brings together excerpts from Nirvanam, a one person performance, by Pritham K. Chakravarthy and a family of three generations of trans-gendered female subjects, Aasha, Seetha and Dhana, who are bound together by ties of adoption. They all belong to the trans-gendered community called Aravanis (aka Hijras, in some parts of India). The film juxtaposes the ‘normality’ of their existence with the dark and powerful narrative by Pritham- ‘Nirvanam’; Nirvanam (Liberation) refers to the act of liberating oneself from the male body and transforming oneself to a female. This narrative bears witness to the tumultuous journey towards a reinvented selfhood, a journey fraught with violence, exploitation, affection and courage. The pains, pleasures and dilemmas of becoming the ‘other’ is the motif of the film. Weaving together performance, life histories and everyday life, it problematises the divides between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
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The Loom 2001

The fabric of the city emerged from the warp and weft of diverse threads, from the labour of migrant communities that made Bombay/Mumbai their own.
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Story Maker : Story Taker 1996

This is an attempt at bringing together a selection of the stories and paintings of the Warlis, and some of the writings about them. To the Warlis, a community of Adivasis (indigenous peoples), who live close to Bombay, these stories represent their history, their world-view. All the outsiders, the Portuguese, the Marathas, the British, the native settlers… they all tried obliterating this history and wisdom. The work of the outsiders who wrote about the Warli represents this process of creating new mythologies. By bringing together these disparate discourses, this video aspires to critique these mythologies… To read between the lines, as the stories themselves do.