Nostalgia for the Future

Avijit Mukul Kishore is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Mumbai, working in documentary and interdisciplinary moving-image practices. He is involved in cinema pedagogy as a lecturer, and curates film programs for prominent national cultural institutions. He is the director of Snapshots from a Family Album, Vertical City, To Let the World In, and Electric Shadows: Journeys in Image-making.  He served as cinematographer for Kumar Talkies, Kali Salwaar, John and Jane, Seven Islands and a Metro, Bidesia in Bambai, I am Micro, and An Old Dog’s Diary. He has been studying the archive of Films Division India for several years, in an attempt to understand the visual languages invented by the state in the project of nation-building.

Rohan Shivkumar is an architect and an urban designer practicing in Mumbai; he serves as the Deputy Director of the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies. His work spans architecture and interior design, to urban research and consultancy on issues concerning housing, public space and sanitation. He is interested in exploring the many ways of reading and representing the city, and is co-editor of Project Cinema City, which concerns a research and art collaboration. He also curates film programs and blogs for Anarchytect on cinema and urban issues. He is working on a book discussing approaches to the design of homes among Indian architectural practices.

Bhaskar Sarkar is the chair of the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies. His primary research interests include risk and speculative media; post-colonial media theory; political economy of global media; and history and memory. Sarkar is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009), a critical exploration of the cinematic traces of a particular historical trauma. He is coeditor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge, 2009), and a special issue of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies on “Indian Documentary Studies.” He has published essays on philosophies of visuality, transnational media, cineplasticity, and Indian and Chinese popular cinemas in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Rethinking History: Theory and Practice, Cultural Dynamics, Framework, and New Review of Film and Television Studies. At present, he is completing a monograph titled Cosmoplastics: Bollywood’s Global Gesture, and a co-edited collection of essays, Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, forthcoming).