3rd i Films celebrates life, love and liberty with this year’s special Focus on Freedoms, which brings us inspiring stories from the front lines of the struggle for gender equality, and examines the legacy of freedom for India and Pakistan – both historically, and in the present.
Two short docs, Harjant Gill’s Mardistan (India) and Prasanna Vithanage’s Silence in the Courts (Sri Lanka), take a gender-integrated approach to the issue of sexual violence by examining how men and masculinities are embedded in this problem. SF-based Nyna Caputi’s empowering doc, Petals in the Dust, explores the cultural origins of gender violence, and profiles the unimaginable stories of brave survivors. The program will play in Palo Alto, and will be followed by a panel discussion on the freedoms and futures of women in India.
The focus also Our Voices of Partition program will address the former through a screening of A Thin Wall, a documentary by Mara Ahmad that examines memory, history and the possibility of reconciliation. The film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring first-person accounts from elders and community members, organized in collaboration with the 1947 Partition Archive. Our centerpiece film at the Castro Theatre examines the continuing conundrum of Kashmir with a presentation of Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider, a masterful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that transposes the action to this war-torn region. Screenwriter Basharat Peer (writer of the acclaimed book, Curfewed Nights) will be in attendance at the screening.
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