An Ordinary Election (2015, India/Germany, 125 min.)
- in Hindi and English, with English subtitles
The story of an Indian election campaign from up-close - an intimate ground-up perspective of the anxieties, ambitions, struggles, and intrigues from the electoral battleground.
Synopsis
Delhi, August - December 2013.
A new politics of hope and change flickers in the world's largest democracy, as a rank outsider makes an audacious bid for political power. A tiny new political party prepares to take on the mighty political establishment in the capital city: the Aam Aadmi Party, the party of the Common Man.
An Ordinary Election tells the extra-ordinary story of the Aam Aadmi Party's debut election campaign in the constituency of RK Puram, Delhi. From the campaign war room to the streets, from the narrow lanes of urban slums to the manicured parks of upper-class neighbourhoods, the crew follows the charismatic candidate Shazia Ilmi and the ordinary men and women of the Aam Aadmi Party fighting to change the terms of Indian democracy in an election campaign where victory seems impossible.
As it documents the progress of the campaign, the film raises several questions:
Both within and outside the party, who is the aam aadmi, the common man? Can the Aam Aadmi Party live up to its own ideals of decentralization and swaraj or self-rule? What is the fine line that distinguishes political sincerity from political expediency?
An Ordinary Election is the story of the battle for Indian democracy from up-close: an intimate ground-up perspective of the anxieties, ambitions, struggles, and intrigues from the electoral battleground itself.
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A film by Lalit Vachani
Produced by CeMIS (Göttingen, Germany)
http://www.lalitvachani.com/film09.html
Lalit Vachani
Lalit Vachani is a documentary filmmaker, producer and video editor. He is director of the New Delhi based Wide Eye Film. He studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.
Lalit Vachani’s documentaries include The Starmaker (about the business of ‘starmaking’ in the Hindi film industry); The Boy in the Branch and The Men in the Tree (on the Hindu nationalist organization, the RSS); The Play Goes On (about a socialist street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch); The Salt Stories (following the trail of Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march in India seventy years later); Tales from Napa (about a village that resisted Hindu fundamentalist forces during the 2002 riots in India) and An Ordinary Election ( an in-depth study of an Indian election campaign).
In 2007, he directed In Search of Gandhi as one of ten international filmmakers commissioned to make 52 min. films for the 'Why Democracy?' global television series, which was broadcast across 42 international television channels, including ZDF/Arte in Germany, BBC and BBC World (UK), Arte (France), Canal + (Spain), SBS (Australia), NHK (Japan) and SABC (South Africa).
Vachani’s films have received grant awards from the Soros and Sundance Documentary Foundations, the Jan Vrijman Fund, and the India Foundation for the Arts.
Some of the venues and film festivals where his work has been shown are: Kino Arsenal, Berlin; Oberhausen International Short Film Festival and DOK-Leipzig in Germany; International Documentary Film Association (IDFA), Amsterdam; Festival International du Documentaire, Marseille; One World Human Rights Film Festival, Prague; Film South Asia, Kathmandu; Zanzibar International Film Festival in Tanzania; the Asian Social Forum, Hyderabad; the World Social Forum, Mumbai; MIAAC, New York and the Queens Museum of Art, New York.
Vachani has taught on topics related to film analysis, media, politics and the documentary film at the Mass Communication Research Centre in Delhi, India, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and at Amherst College in the USA.
He was visiting scholar at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University in 1999, and a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Religious Diversity and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen in 2011 and 2012.
Lalit Vachani lives in Göttingen, Germany where he teaches courses on media and politics, the political documentary film and documentary theory and production at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Göttingen.