17th IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival in its online edition
Event date: 5 March, 2021 – 07:00 to 7 March, 2021 – 07:00
The IAWRT Chapter India is happy to announce the 17th IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival in its online edition to mark the International Women’s Day. This edition of AWFF 2021 will be held from 5th to 7th March 2021, facilitating a digital space for showcasing films and discussions during the prevailing conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The festival programme includes fiction, non-fiction, animation and experimental films made by filmmakers from Asia and of Asian origin from India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Afghanistan, Armenia, Malaysia, United States, Finland, Belgium, and Iran. The festival also features conversations around the films to generate dialogue and reflection on ideas and form, making room for filmmakers, across the globe, to share their process. This is strengthened by two Masterclasses – on editing in films with the award-winning editor, Jabeen Merchant and, on sound in films with the renowned sound practitioner Amala Popuri, which focus on questions of craft and practice, and how women practitioners respond to challenges in their work. A special feature of the festival is films by first-time women filmmakers to showcase how the young experience the world.
To facilitate worldwide viewership, each film will be available for a 48-hour window of free streaming via the festival’s online Screening Room. Discussions with the filmmakers and Masterclasses will be live streamed, and are free and open to all.
We invite you to tune in to the film screenings and conversations.
Register and follow the Festival’s website for updates!
This year, the experiences of living through the pandemic have shaped the underlying thread of uncertainty that runs through the voices and practices that the programme presents. This year’s programme of 33 films encourages viewers to look towards the challenges facing the world as they manifest in individual and collective lives, and draw from the stories of hope to imagine new possibilities. The films present both the inner lives of characters as well as larger structural issues to reinforce our abiding belief in the inextricable link between the personal and the political.
– Deepti Khurana, Festival Director
The COVID 19 pandemic has shown that in a globalised world, erecting walls and barbed wire fences cannot bring about protection. And so, the need to dismantle enforced segregation and instead build solidarities, is not just a moral imperative but a practical one. As creative media practitioners, we turn to the arts to help us do that, and our festival this year draws attention to this, both in the form that it has taken as an online festival and in the films that are being screened. We continue to strive towards building networks through artistic practice and highlight common ground with women filmmakers from across Asia. For IAWRT India, the Asian Women’s Film Festival is not a festival of what are commonly termed “women’s issues” but one that focuses on women’s perspectives of the world, on questions that are of concern to everyone.
– Samina Mishra, Managing Trustee
