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CSAS Lecture Series | <i>An Ordinary Election</i> Film Screening

Wednesday, September 16, 2015
4:00 AM
North Quad Room 2435

(2015, Color and B/W, Video; 125 min.) - in Hindi and English, with English subtitles

The story of an Indian election campaign from up-close - an intimate ground-up perspective of the anxieties, ambitions, struggles, and intrigues from the electoral battleground.

Delhi, August - December 2013  |  A new politics of hope and change flickers in the world's largest democracy, as a rank outsider makes an audacious bid for political power. A tiny new political party prepares to take on the mighty political establishment in the capital city: the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the party of the Common Man. Like its counterparts from Greece to Spain, this anti-establishment party promises to vanquish political corruption and bring power back to ordinary people.

An Ordinary Election tells the extra-ordinary story of the Aam Aadmi Party's debut election campaign in the constituency of RK Puram, Delhi. From the campaign war room to the streets, from the narrow lanes of urban slums to the manicured parks of upper-class neighborhoods, the crew follows the charismatic candidate Shazia Ilmi and the ordinary men and women of the AAP fighting to change the terms of Indian democracy in an election campaign where victory seems impossible...

Credits

Camera and location sound: Lalit Vachani, Syed Husain Akbar, Anurag Dasgupta
Postproduction audio: Girjashanker Vohra, Paul Schneiter
Postproduction video: Avik Chatterjee
Edited by Lalit Vachani
Research and co-production: Srirupa Roy
Researched, produced and directed by Lalit Vachani
Produced by CeMIS - the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany
A Wide Eye Film, 2015

Lalit Vachani is a documentary filmmaker, producer and editor. He is director of the New Delhi based Wide Eye Film. He studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. Vachani was visiting scholar at the Centre for Media, Culture and History at New York University, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Religious Diversity, and at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen, Germany. He was also a visiting lecturer at the Mass Communication Research Centre in Delhi, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and at Amherst College. At present, Lalit divides his time between India and Germany, where he teaches courses on the political documentary and documentary theory and production at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Göttingen.

Speaker:
Lalit Vachani, Independent Filmmaker