Kathi, Kathi, Kaarana

This urban investigation film is facilitated by Varun Kurtkoti and produced by UnBox Cultural Futures Society and Quicksand Design.

Kathi, Kathi, Kaarana (Tell Tale Travels) is an anthology of ‘true fiction’, narrated and produced by workers and their families from the city of Bangalore.

A sanitation worker dreams of becoming a lawyer to fight for her and her fellow workers’ rights; a mother dreams of sharing her secrets and struggles with her child; a woman rehearses to prepare for a difficult conversation with her boyfriend…

The film marks the culmination of a pedagogical experiment — a weekend film school that explored that language of storytelling, well-being and mental health, and the birth of an artist collective. 

In 2021, Unbox Cultural Future Society & Quicksand Studio set out to work on a participatory project exploring the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the mental well-being of informalized workers in the city of Bengaluru as part of Mindscapes. We wanted to explore the conundrum of language and mental health, everyday stories of urban life and resilience, and the importance of lived experience. 

Filmmaker and Facilitator Varun Kurtkoti designed a pedagogic model to make this film. He, along with a small film crew, began working with a diverse set of contributors — an auto driver, sanitation workers, workers from a sex workers union, and some of their family members. As the project evolved through discussions between the participants and the filmmaker, the participants expressed a keen interest in how to make films and articulate themselves through a visual and theatrical medium. Thus began a pedagogical experiment: a weekend film school for a group of workers from Bengaluru that Varun designed, based on the Theatre of the Oppressed Methodologies.  As the project evolved through discussions between the participants and the filmmaker, the participants expressed a keen interest in how to make films and articulate themselves through a visual and theatrical medium. Thus began a pedagogical experiment: a weekend film school for a group of workers from Bengaluru that Varun designed, based on the Theatre of the Oppressed Methodologies. 

The output of this process was Kathi Kathi Kaarana, a collaboratively directed short film created by the students of the weekend school. The film explores mental wellbeing as a factor of the politics of ‘home’. What does it take to have a home, and manage it? More than infrastructure, the project explores the idea of home as the possession of an abstract-yet-real mental space of one's own. But the film is not the end of the process, and we continue the journey with a dream: a production house for laborers and informal sector workers; one that will produce stories, and serve as a night school for those who wish to learn filmmaking.

Facilitator: In this projects’ context, there is no technical ‘director’. Further, even during the ‘school’ process, there is no teacher. Instead, we have a facilitator, Varun Kurtkoti. Facilitation in this project’s context, is more than teaching, directing, mediating or providing - it is about taking a step back and designing a pedagogic structure that diffuses power. It is to provoke, invoke and guide when necessary. 

Team: the team that assisted the facilitator in designing the process, includes the participants (Shanmugam, Preeti, Chandrashree, Suhas, Nishita, Anita, Balaji), the facilitating crew members (Vivek Sangwan, Navya Sah, Bhamati Sivapalan, Ravi Ranjan, Himanshu Bhat, Sumedha Choudhary), the unbox producers (Fiza Jha, Faith Gonsalves), and facilitator Varun Kurtkoti. 

Producers: The film was produced by Fiza Jha and Faith Gonsalves of Quicksand and UnBox Cultural Futures Society.