The 91亚色 Centre for Asian Research is pleased to host Lalit Vachani to present his new documentary 鈥淧risoner No. 626710 is Present鈥. The documentary will be screened on Feb 12, 2025 at 2.30pm at 91亚色, Keele campus, as part of YCAR鈥檚 South Asia lecture series, 鈥淒emos, democracy and democratization鈥. This will be followed by a Q&A with the director. Prior registration is required to attend the event. Please register using this . The event is co-sponsored by聽the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair, Toronto Metropolitan University.
This documentary film is about Umar Khalid, a student union activist leader in India鈥檚 prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. In 2020, Khalid was arrested under the draconian UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) 鈥 a law that designates individuals as terrorists and allows the Indian State to imprison people without due process. The film explores Khalid's journey and his continued struggles against State repression. In the film, two of Khalid鈥檚 friends, Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, reconstruct the events that led to his arrest and talk about the role played by the right-wing media in framing Khalid. They highlight the challenges they continue to face in the Indian judicial system. The documentary engages with the important question of what human resilience looks like in the face of authoritarianism.
Lalit Vachani is a documentary filmmaker, lecturer and research scholar at CeMIS (the Centre for Modern Indian Studies) at the University of G枚ttingen. Some of his other documentaries include In Search of Gandhi (2007) and The Salt Stories (2009) which follow the trail of Gandhi's salt march in Narendra's Modi's Gujarat; The Play Goes On (2005) on the leftist street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch; An Ordinary Election (2015), an in-depth study of an Indian election campaign by a new political party 鈥 the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party); and The Boy in the Branch (1993) and The Men in the Tree (2002) which document the ideology and the growth of the RSS and Hindu nationalism.
The film won SiGNS Cinema of Resistance Award in 2024. It has been officially selected in the Long Documentary Competition and International Documentary Film Festival. Please watch the trailer .