Event Details:
Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia and the Chair in Feminsit Studies, UCSC.
About the Film
Working Girls is a vivid, genre-defying documentary that traverses India to uncover the invisible yet essential work performed by women — from care work and domestic work to surrogacy and sex work. Filmed in Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong, Latur, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad and Madurai, the film meets domestic workers, farmers, mothers, ASHA workers, dancers, and organisers whose labour sustains society but is rarely acknowledged.
With biting humour, powerful music, and a deep dive into the histories of law and gender,Working Girls challenges dominant ideas about labour, value, and visibility.
Directed by Paromita Vohra and created in collaboration with the Laws of Social Reproduction project, building on their research, the film invites us to rethink what it means to work — and who gets to be seen as a worker.
The event will be moderated by Anjali Arondekar (UCSC) and Usha Iyer (Faculty Director, Center for South Asia).
Credits
Writer-Director: Paromita Vohra
Concept: Prabha Kotiswaran
Camera: Avijit Mukul Kishore
Editing: Nishant Radhakrishnan, Sankalp Meshram
Sound: Achuth Sahadevan, Namshad Hameed, Rajesh Saseendran, Sneha Sundar and others
Music: Bonnie Chakraborty
Sound Mix: Gissy Michael
About the Director
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, love, desire and popular culture and spans many forms including documentary, fiction, print, video and sound installation. Her work as director includes the path-breaking documentaries Unlimited Girls and Q2P as well as Partners in Crime, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Where’ Sandra, Cosmopolis:Two Tales of A City and A Woman’s Place; the television series Connected Hum Tum and several music videos. In 2015 she founded the path-breaking Agents of Ishq, a platform about sex, love and desire for Indians.
She has written the fiction feature Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) the play IshqiyaDharavi Ishtyle, the comic Priya’s Mirror and several documentaries. Her fiction and non-fiction have been widely published and her weekly column Paronormal Activity is in its 15th year.