Intro
I have been practising photography/filmmaking for the past 6 years winning several photography awards including being a finalist in the Sony awards and UNESCO silk road photo contest. Recently I have graduated studying a Photojournalism degree in the university of arts London . Being born into an agricultural family my artwork has always been about representing the socially oppressed communities and the inequalities faced by them in their daily course of life. Throughout my 6 years of photographic practice, I have tried to represent these problems in the still photographic form, but it was only later in 2019 that I made my first short film about the relationship between the LGBTQ community and religion in India, after the completion of this project and its several film festival selections including being a finalist in the Filmfare short film awards. I realised the power that a moving image piece holds in 20th-century globalisation has increased the production and distribution of several forms of media, art, goods etc and made it accessible to the larger part of the world which has created an everlasting competition within people and their timespan of looking at artworks has reduced, I am interested in making films and photographic works that accomplishes the tasks of appealing to the masses at the same time acts as the voice to the voiceless by bringing their daily life stories to a worldwide audience. My previous short film " Shivanum mohiniyum" deals with the themes of religious extremism practised by the government combining it with the themes of gender LGBTQ identity. My latest film is a feature film “Poem of the Wind “it’s about “Bharani, an emerging theatre artist is subjected to the stereotypical ways of masculinity from his childhood but the mere femininity inside him confuses his stand on what society expects out of him. The film charts the three stages of Bharani’s life from his childhood to old age following the regrets he attains during the final stages of his life. Inspired by Charles Bukowski’s poem “Blue Bird “I believe the themes in my artwork are often universal and stories of this kind need to be told for society or at least to bring up a change in an individual.