“My name is Marty Chen. I taught policy at the Harvard Kennedy School for 35 years and co-founded the WIEGO network which seeks to empower the working poor in the informal economy around the world to secure their livelihoods. Before joining Harvard University, Iworked in Bangladesh in the 1970s and India in the 1980s with NGOs seeking to empower the working poor in villages and cities.
In 2020, I was asked by Nondita Mehrotra to chair the jury for that year’s Nagari Short Film competition. The topic for that year’s films – “people and livelihoods in urban India” – was a topic that is central to my work and dear to my heart. So, I readily agreed. There were five of us on the jury – an art critic and poet, a lawyer and judge, two filmmakers and an activist academic. The jury jointly viewed the nine films – then discussed the films at some length, sharing our different perspectives, and then voted on the films. It was a difficult task to rank the films – as each was strong in different ways.
All of the films in the competition were powerful – telling the story of the barriers faced by the working poor in trying to earn a living in urban India: barriers that range from social discrimination and prejudice to lack of urban services. sanitation and governance to climate change to corporate collusion with politicians and government and to the COVID pandemic recession. The films featured a range of urban occupations: food vending, fast food delivery, liquor-making, fishing, water chestnut harvesting, tailoring, construction day labour, and migrant workers in a yarn recycling facility, at a stone quarry and in floating casinos. One film also featured the aspirations of two children of the working poor – to study for a PhD and to perform as a break dancer.
Having worked on the livelihood challenges of poor households in India and South Asia for four decades, I was deeply moved and impressed by how the young filmmakers, who were new to the subject, were able to capture the barriers the working poor face in pursuing their livelihoods but also their dignity, expertise and resilience. To paraphrase the adage, “a short film is worth 10,000 words”. My hope is that the Nagari Short Film competition will continue to document core issues of urban India – as short films are an excellent medium for communicating challenging urban issues through the lens of those who have to deal with them on an everyday basis.”
Anjali Monteiro | Nagari Jury 2022
“The Nagari Short Film Competition has been a wonderfully generative space since its inception in 2020. It has facilitated the production of a large number of short documentary films by young people that are crucial to understanding urban dynamics and crises in the Indian context. Its focus on voices from the margins gives visibility to perspectives that are often not considered by urban planners and policymakers. From housing, to livelihoods, to water and waste management, it has created valuable and timely content. This initiative is truly worthy of support and encouragement, for both the process and the product make an important contribution to the conversations around urban planning, development and the rights of citizens.”
Nandini Oomman | Nagari Jury 2022
“I was a Nagari short film festival jury panellist in 2022 and can attest that the short films made by young filmmakers in this Charles Correa Foundation (CCF) competition address key issues of our times in creative and enlightening ways. In 2022, the theme was water and urban spaces. I learned so much about Mumbai’s water system through the story of one man’s impossible journey to get a legal water connection in his community-the urban settlement of Siddharth Nagar in Mumbai, and another young woman’s story about the challenge of living with rainwater streaming into her community from an adjacent and huge garbage dump on the outskirts of a large urban metropolis. Nagari is a unique film platform– it showcases hidden stories about the lived experience of people in diverse conditions of different cities–and should be supported to continue to raise awareness of and trigger solutions to the challenges of rapid and massive urbanisation.”