Please join us for a special screening and conversation with filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, a collaboration between the Film Study Center and Sensory Ethnography class. Patwardhan will visit with students and fellows and screen his documentary, War and Peace, on November 8. In addition to this event, Patwardhan’s films are currently screening at the Harvard Film Archive.

“For more than four decades,” his 2020 New York Times Magazine profile notes, Anand Patwardhan “has been India’s leading documentary filmmaker.” X-rays of Indian modernity, his frequently expressionistic films tug at the frayed edges of an unraveling nation to reveal the threads—of class inequity, casteism, masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and nationalism—that warp and weft through the fabric of what the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party calls the New India.” –IDA

About War and Peace:

Filmed over four tumultuous years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the USA following nuclear tests in the Indian sub-continent, War and Peace is a documentary journey of peace activism in the face of global militarism and war. The film is framed by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, an act whose portent and poignancy remains undiminished half a century later. For the filmmaker, whose family was immersed in the non-violent Gandhian movement, the sub-continent’s trajectory towards unabashed militarism is explored with sorrow though the film captures stories of resistance along the way. Amongst these is a visit to the “enemy country” of Pakistan, where contrary to expectations, Indian delegates are showered by affection not only by their counterparts in the peace movement but by uninitiated common folk.

The film moves on to examine the costs being extracted from citizens in the name of national security. From the plight of residents living near the nuclear test site to the horrendous effects of uranium mining on local indigenous populations, it becomes abundantly clear that contrary to a myth first created by the U.S.A, there is no such thing as the “peaceful Atom”.

War and Peace slips seamlessly from a description of home made jingoism to focus on how an aggressive United States has become a role model, its doctrine of “Might is Right” only too well-absorbed by aspiring elites of the developing world.

War has become perennial, enemies are re-invented and economies inextricably tied to the production and sale of weapons. In the moral wastelands of the world memories of Gandhi seem like a mirage that never was, created by our thirst for peace and our very distance from it.

Open to FSC fellows, CMP students, and the AFVS community.