Up Down & Sideways
“If not for you, I have no other true love. When we work together the sun sets early If not for you, I have no love”
Close to the India – Myanmar border is the village of Phek in Nagaland. Around 5000 people live here, almost all of whom cultivate rice for their own consumption. As they work in cooperative groups – preparing the terraced fields, planting saplings, or harvesting the grain and carrying it up impossibly steep slopes – the rice cultivators of Phek sing. The seasons change, and so does the music, transforming the mundane into the hypnotic. The love that they sing of is also a metaphor for the need for the other – the friend, the family, the community, to build a polyphony of voices. Stories of love, stories of the field, stories of song, stories in song. Up, Down and Sideways is a musical portrait of a community of rice cultivators and their memories of love and loss, created from working together on the fields. Up, Down and Sideways is the first feature film from the u-ra-mi-li project, a larger body of work that looks at the connections between music and labour through film, writing and archives.
Director
Anushka Meenakshi was trained as mathematician and a broadcast journalist before turning to film-making. Since 2004 she has been making commissioned films for several non profits. In 2006, she co-directed her first independent film “c/o Platform”, about a group of pavement dwellers in George Town, Chennai, which was funded by PSBT. In 2009, she made “My Name is Basheer”, about the Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, under an early-career fellowship provided by the School of Media and Culture Studies, TISS. She has also worked as a community video trainer, and designs and performs music for theatre productions. In 2014, Anushka completed an MA in World Music Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her dissertation examined the cultural, historical, and practical processes influencing the creation of a collaborative community archive in Phek, Nagaland.
Iswar Srikumar began his career working in technical production for the stage, designing lights and sound for numerous dance, music and theatre productions. After a few years of working behind the scenes, he began his journey as an actor in 2003, and has been performing regularly in contemporary English theatre, as well as in short films and full length features in Tamil, Hindi and English.
Iswar and Anushka are both members of Perch, a performance collective in Chennai comprising of artists from various disciplines. In 2011, they started the u-ra-mi-li project (the song of our people), which focuses on stories about music in the everyday, through writing, photograph, performance and film.”
Festivals/Awards
Yamagata Documentary Film Festival (New Asian Currents Award for Excellence, & the Directors Guild of Japan Award), BIFED Bozcaada Turkey (Third Prize, International Competition), WOMEX Film Library Katowice, MAMI Mumbai (Grand Jury Special Mention), International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam Amsterdam, MOSTRA Sao Paolo,India Kaleidoscope at the Museum of the Moving Image New York, MUVI Lisboa Lisboa (Musical Odyssey International Section, Jury Prize), Bala Kailasam memorial Chennai (Documentary Award for innovative use of media for social change), Madurai Film Festival, Little Cinema Festival Kolkata, Cinema Planeta Cuernevaca (First Prize, International Competition), International Film Festival of Los Angeles, Chennai Short and Documentary Festival