Hello Photo

Nina Davenport, 16mm film, 55 mins. (1995)

Photographer and filmmaker Nina Davenport spent one year traveling throughout India with her 16mm hand-crank movie camera.

In one extraordinary image after another, this award-winning film shows us a jute factory straight out of the industrial age, a rooftop kite festival, cows stuck in traffic jams, elephants blessing people.

We’re taken behind the scenes of a traveling circus to the sidelines of a polo match, inside the classrooms of a school for blind boys to a ceremony for an arranged marriage.

We return now and then to the sets of Bombay’s thriving film industry and to the streets where crowds of people stare back at the filmmaker.

Hello Photo is at once a revelatory visual experience of India, and also about the truths and deceptions inherent in making movies.

Distributed by First Run Features, New York.