Soundphiles

Soundphiles is a celebration of listening. Our worlds today are navigated increasingly through images, with sound running as a hidden layer. We know this well in film practice where the image has a frame but sound can be limitless. And yet, despite the growing number of festivals, focused listening contexts are few, limited to radio and art gallery spaces, with each providing room for a particular kind of sound practice. Soundphiles is an attempt to bring into focus the act of listening via multiple forms of sound practice, to explore whether we begin to listen differently to the soundtracks of our lives.

The first edition of Soundphiles – Many Echoes, Many Worlds – was curated from diverse practices and comprises works by filmmakers, artists, journalists and media/arts students. Their work brought in a diversity of worlds in a variety of forms – the rhythm of the textile mills of Malegaon, broken sounds from the contested streets of London, a deafening bombing in Iran, scratchy magnetic tracks of old Hindi films.

Artists featured in the DIFF selection

Frameworks Collective (Ruchika Negi and Amit  Mahanti), India
Threads As Yet Undone, 5min
Synopsis: Through the rhythm of a loom in Malegaon, can you hear the voice in your mind?

Namrata Mehta, India
We Want Justice,  2min 30sec
Synopsis: Innocent wordplay by two young girls on the Delhi Metro forces you to think about learnt gender roles and the importance of a discourse on the word justice.

Nazli Deniz, Turkey
Farz-I Muhal/ As If, 4min 47sec
Synopsis: A woman who has childhood memories about her parents, dreams one night or, maybe, every night.

Paromita Vohra, India
PCO1: Rangoon, 1min 18sec
Synopsis: Technology and Romance connect in a trunk-call

Switchboard 1: Ruby The Telephone Operator, 2min 56sec
Synopsis: Based on a piece from a 1930s magazine, a meditation on “office girl vs. wife”

Rashmi Kaleka, India
kabariiiiaaaaa, 6min 32sec
Synopsis: Kabari Walla is India’s inherent voice that lends to the recycling of waste collected from door to door in every urban city.

BREAK Shiva Sanjari, Iran
War from 1980 till today, 4min 36sec
Synopsis: 4 minutes and 36 seconds of our life in Iran in the midst of war.

Shumona Goel and Michael Northam, India and USA
We Have Never Been Modern, 7min 12sec
Synopsis: Set in an unadorned space, We Have Never Been Modern is a meditative environment that draws the listener into a haunted, dream world.

Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, India
Neuro-ICU, 5min 28sec
Synopsis: Field recordings from a neuro-ICU are layered with voice-notes of the artist and of the patients’ family members–about the act of recording one’s own voice, of speaking with the hope of being heard.

Tahera Aziz, UK
[re]locate (the attack), 5min 26sec
Synopsis: [re]locate (the attack) explores sound as remembrance by revisiting the tragic events surrounding the racially motived murder of Stephen Lawrence at a bus stop in South-East London in 1993.

Usha Rao, India
August (Edited), 5min 41sec
Synopsis: The artist searches for the sound of nature and of the ordinary life that were once a part of the cityscape, sounds that are being drowned by the deafening din of development.

Samina Mishra

Samina Mishra is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in New Delhi, with a special interest in media for children. Her films includes Jagriti Yatra (2013), Two Lives (2007), The House on Gulmohar Avenue (2005) and Stories of Girlhood (2001). She has also created a multi-media exhibition, Home and Away (2004) and written children’s books published by Scholastic, Tulika, Young Zubaan, The Wisdom Tree and Penguin. Her work has shown at festivals both in India and abroad including the Tri-continental Film Festival, the Commonwealth Film Festival and the festival of the International Society of Electronic Arts. She is the recipient of grants from the Charles Wallace Trust, British Council and Pro Helvetia. In 2010, she was awarded the Sea Change Residency by the Gaea Foundation, USA in recognition of her work across disciplines. She is currently heading the Nehru Learning Centre for Children and Youth.

Iram Ghufran

Iram Ghufran is a filmmaker and artist based in New Delhi. Her work has been shown in several international art and cinematic contexts including the Berlin Film Festival, Experimenta India, World Social Forum and ISEA among others. Iram has won two National Film Awards for her work, besides the Mary Kay prize at the International Women’s Film Festival in Korea and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. She is the recipient of the first Jai Chandiram Memorial Fellowship instituted by the India Chapter of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television for a film on mental health. Iram is the Artistic Director of Sandarbh, a not-for-profit artists initiative working for public art in the Vagad region of in Rajasthan. She has recently finished a documentary on filmmaker Shyam Benegal.