This week the Asian Institute is proud to partner with the Cinema Studies Institute and the Royal Ontario Museum to bring Anand Patwardhan, India’s leading documentary filmmaker, to Toronto. For over four decades Mr Patwardhan has pointed his lens at modern India, examining the nature of its economic development, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and the struggles by the poor and marginalised for justice. It has taken legal action, including a decision by India’s Supreme Court, to prevent successive governments from censoring his films.
On Thursday, November 22, 2012, Mr Patwardhan’s War and Peace will be screened at the Royal Ontario Museum. The film chronicles the journey of peace activism in a time of global militarism and war. It is dramatically framed by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi; it shows that even fifty years after his death Gandhi seems like a foil for our thirst for peace and our very distance from it. Its power has not diminished in the ten years since its premiere ten years ago.
Mr Patwardhan will give a seminar entitled “Cinemas of Resistance” at the Munk School of Global Affairs the following day on Friday, November 23, 2012.
For more information, please visit the links below.