“Stories are also a vital bridge of ideas, emotion, and experience that is crucial for Dalit movements. We are still profoundly isolated in an island of denial and invisibility in the mainstream media and to the international community. It is this reason that I was moved to start work on my 3D Feature length documentary Touchable: The Journey from Untouchable to Dalit. But fundamentally, when we are talking about the stories of 300 million people, we need not one film but many. And we need to talk about what are the kinds of narratives that will empower us for the future. Some films are poverty narratives. Set in between the missionary imagery and national geographic, Dalits are showcased as being trapped in conditions that are immovable, and, as timeless as the classic photography that has captured them on film. We don’t see enough films about our agency. For while we have endured for centuries, we have also had one of the longest legacies of resistance. This is the conversation I hope to engage with my film.” (Thenmozhi Soundararajan)
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