Subasri Krishnan | Film Screening and Discussion of "What the Fields Remember" Moderated by Usha Iyer

Film Screening moderated by Usha Iyer, Department of Art and Art History

On 18th February 1983, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, more than 2000 Muslims were killed in the town of Nellie and its surrounding villages in Assam, India. People’s homes were burnt down and their fields destroyed. Most of those who died were old people, women and children. Till date the Nellie massacre, remains on the margins of India’s public history, and is virtually wiped out from the nation’s collective memory.

The documentary film What the Fields Remember revisits the massacre three decades later. From the survivors, Sirajuddin Ahmed and Abdul Khayer’s, retelling of the event, and their struggles of coping with loss and memories that refuse to fade away, the film attempts to explore ideas of violence, memory and justice. It also tries to understand how physical spaces that have witnessed the violence continue to mark people’s relationship to history and memory. What the Fields Remember also attempts to raise larger questions around collective memory – of what we choose to remember and why we choose to forget.

Duration: 52 mins/HD/Bengali and English

Subasri is a filmmaker and also heads the Media Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlement (IIHS), an educational institution that works around the urban.

Her films deal with contemporary politics. Her first film “Brave New Medium” on internet censorship in South-East Asia, has been screened at film festivals, both nationally and internationally. The award-winning “This or That Particular Person” looks at the idea of official identity documents, and in that context, the Unique Identity number. The film was adjudged as the Best Short Documentary Film at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK), 2013. Her latest film “What The Fields Remember” on the Nellie massacre that took place in Assam in 1983, explores ideas of memory, violence and justice through survivors’ narratives.

As part of the Media Lab at IIHS, she teaches and curates the Urban Lens film festival. She is also the Festival Director of the 2017 edition of the IAWRT film festival (International Association of Women in Radio and Television). Prior to going to film school, Subasri worked for the academic journal 'Seminar'.