Santajit Chatterjee

Movies

Ripples under the Skin
Sound
'Ripples Under the Skin' is a story of contestations - contestation of space, resources, claims, narratives... of a community struggling to carve out a living out of a dying profession contending with a city that both embraces and marginalizes, of a profession that thrives of supplying water to homes... water that doesn't discriminate yet over whom many wars have been fought... wars of caste, class, religion... of muslim migrant workers supplying water to homes that are inviting and uninviting, of homes that they are sustained over the labour of these people, yet homes that the same people can never claim as their own, of memory and forgetting, of dreams and spectres... above all, this is a story of struggles.
Holy Rights
Music
Filmed over four years, Holy Rights relates the struggles of Safia—a deeply religious Muslim woman from Bhopal—against the patriarchal mindset of the interpreters of Sharia law, which she believes denies women within her community equality and justice. Safia joins a programme that trains women as Qazis—Muslim clerics, traditionally male, who administer the law. As she passes through uncharted territory, Safia faces the tensions that accompany the act of owning her own narrative. After several other women join the programme, the film examines the arbitrary nature of triple talaq (instant divorce by saying “talaq” thrice). It also documents the fight to break free from both patronising voices within Muslim women’s communities, and outside forces that seek to appropriate their movement for political gain.