About the Event
Jai Bhim Comrade
Directed by Anand Patwardhan
India, 2012, 182 min
Jai Bhim Comrade is an intimate epic from one of today’s foremost documentarians, Anand Patwardhan. Filmed over 14 years, it looks back on the life and diverse political commitments of Vilas Ghogre, a poet-singer, Dalit and Communist, who took his own life in despair after police murdered ten people in a slum near his home in Mumbai. Dedicating itself to Ghogre’s memory, the film explores the history of anti-caste struggle in India, the tensions and possibilities of reconciling anti-caste struggle with leftist class struggle, and the profound role of music in Indian liberation movements. Winner of Best Documentary at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and Best Film at the Mumbai International Film Festival, Jai Bhim Comrade is a “samizdat musical,” as critic and director Mark Cousins wrote, that shows how “the tradition of musical interlude in Indian cinema could be redeployed for radical intent.”
This screening is part of a retrospective exhibition of Patwardhan’s work, Anand Patwardhan: Ways of Struggle, on view at the Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from Dec. 13-Feb. 16. Screenings will be held daily in the School’s second-floor Bucher Gallery.