Renu Savant

Renu Savant is a graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, based in Mumbai and has worked as a journalist and researcher. In 2012 she received the Special Jury Award in the 59th National Film Awards held in New Delhi for her short film Airawat; and received the Swarna Kamal for Best Direction in the 62nd National Film Awards in 2015 for her short film Aaranyak. She received the Early Career Fellowship from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, School for Media and Cultural Studies, in 2014 enabling her to produce a four-hour video documentary chronicle, Many Months In Mirya. The film received the John Abraham National Award for Best Documentary (India) in 2017. Raqs Media Collective has chosen this to be shown at the Yokohama Triennale 2020. 

With this grant the film-document tentatively titled Floating that Renu will make on the presence of seasonal migrant labourers in and around Ratnagiri, is part of her series of films in the Konkan coast of Maharashtra. Mirya is Renu’s ancestral village and she has worked there shooting for two previous films - Many Months in Mirya mentioned above and The Ebb Tide, a documentary for PSBT, Doordarshan, on small-scale fishing practices in the village creek. 

Renu has conceived Floating as a film-document more than a documentary film, due to its non-representational form of an unfolding record of the presence of migrant labourers in the region. Renu uses the word ‘documenting’ because the form and its political and ethical dimensions reflect a record of time. Renu has also been validated as a contemporary artist through her participation in the Yokohama Triennale 2020 curated by Raqs Media Collective, and it is her ‘impulse to capture time’ that has given her valence in the discourse of contemporary art beyond documentary filmmaking. 

Considering the proposed film’s location as art, Renu wishes to disseminate the film-document through the circuits of contemporary art. Moreover, she wishes to tap into channels of film festivals that are open to admitting work that blurs the lines between video essay, documentary and experimental narratives. She also wants the film-document to be discussed in educational institutions as a research document, which accepts the making of art as research. 

Floating will be a departure in its methods and process from Renu’s earlier two films on Mirya as it is envisioned as an attempted dialogue with the young men coming to the region to work, documenting their invisible presence in this region. There are various themes related to stability, permissions and movement of people, which Renu will be looking at in the film-document. Renu is mindful of the impact of the pandemic on the migrant workforce. 

While referring to the Japanese landscape theory of Fukei-ron, Renu wants to investigate the power that the landscape exerts on the human body. Here, Renu wants to highlight the specificities of the rural setting with its own moral codes - both as psycho-geography as well as topography - that exerts influence on the way migrant bodies are disciplined. Power structures are embedded in the very land of the rural region. In 1957, the erstwhile Mahar caste in Maharashtra, converted en-masse to Buddhism under the leadership of Dr Ambedkar’s son. Yet all over the country, villages have communities of different castes living, more or less, in segregated spaces. Through the use of the common spaces in a specific village by people only of certain communities and gender, she would like to map how the psycho-geography of the landscape exerts power on our bodies.

Renu acknowledges her power as an urban filmmaker who wants to record the time and experiences of migrant workers in the rural space. There is a need for sensitivity in holding such power. Renu also wants to highlight the project as a ‘document of a woman filmmaker’. This distinction is very important in comparison to her earlier work which was more from the perspective of an anthropologist on rural life. Floating is about male workforce as seen through the lens of a woman filmmaker. On the uniqueness of the migrant labour situation in the rural region, Renu’s project focusses on rural migration, which is relatively less looked at. Rural places are hotbeds of prejudice and fortresses of the landed powerful. “While cities offer anonymity, engagement and more opportunity, rural areas are more claustrophobic places in many ways.” The category of ‘migrant labourer’ is also a floating figure whose lower caste status is often hidden in the development narrative.

IFA finds it important to support this film-document that looks at migration to the rural area, at a time when the precariousness of labourers are most acute, as made visible through the exodus after Covid-19 lockdown. Renu’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be a high-resolution copy of the film-document on a hard disk, along with the footage, production stills, film deck and publicity materials.

This grant is made possible with support from Voltas Limited under its CSR Initiative.