Documentary film on Ganga screened at Chitkara University

Chitkara University organised an exclusive movie screening of feature-length documentary film ‘Moving Upstream: Ganga’ directed by Shirdhar Sudhir, an industry mentor at Chitkara Design School and National Institute of Design alumnus.

The screening was held at the university auditorium in the presence of pro-chancellor Dr Madhu Chitkara among other dignitaries. Proper social distancing norms were followed for everyone’s safety.

The documentary, filmed over six months between June 2016 and April 2017 on slow river exploration journeys based on research projects and archives for fixing accountability, is a first-person account of a 3000-kilometre walk from Ganga Sagar in West Bengal till Gangotri in Uttarakhand. The project has documented the flow of the river and life of the riparian community living along Ganga.

The producer, Siddharth Agrawal, also the founder of Veditum India Foundation’s Moving Upstream project, is an aerospace engineer from IIT Kharagpur, feels that walking allowed the time gap needed for clear thinking. The slow pace allowed a calm thinking bereft of the clutter associated with the highly politicised topic of the Ganga.

Director of the film, Shridhar Sudhir is a graduate of the NID, Ahmedabad, and has been making independent films, both fiction and non-fiction, on contemporary India for the last five years. Based out of Himachal Pradesh, he is the founder of Buddhijeev Studios, a venture which tries to make vernacular content for the Indian audience through independent films and the YouTube channel Buddhijeev.

Sudhir has been associated with Chitkara Design School for the past one year as an integral member, teaching filmmaking to our students. His movie is a piece of art which gave our students the chance to witness the nuances of independent film-making, a faculty member said.

The film includes unique footage that interprets stories from the immediate vicinity of the Ganga. The ‘Moving Upstream’ series is an attempt to document the stories of the rivers of India, bringing out a first person narrative of the river’s condition and life of the people of the basin.

Shridhar treaded over 500 km along the Ganga in the final stretch of the Moving Upstream walk, and his documentation forms an integral component of the film.