Pushkar Puran

What is Bangla kalpavigyan? Is there such a thing as Bangla Science Fiction? Is there such a thing as Indian SF? This is our journey with the genre, captured and presented like never before in film. Beginning with the early work of writers such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain (Begum Rokeya) and the speculative mode in Bengal, and ending with the pioneering webzine Kalpabiswa, the film traces the historical arc of kalpavigyan over a century of the genre. From the genre magazines of the 1960s-80s and the writers and editors who ignited the movement by giving it shape and form, the film presents a series of conversations and critical reflections from researchers and scholars who have worked with the genre both in relation to Bengal and kalpavigyan as well as the wider phenomenon of SF.

Kota, a city in North-West India famous for its coaching institutions, attracts more than 200,000 teenagers from all across the country to prepare for the undergraduate competitive exams. These students reside in cubicle sized hostel rooms and study for more than 15 hours a day for two consecutive years to crack the entrance exams for prestigious colleges that has acceptance rate of less than one percent. These students face intense insurmountable pressure from coaching institutes, peers and their families which not everyone is equipped to cope with, resulting in some students taking the extreme step of suicide.

An intimate look into Demers family's experience raising children while dealing with the societal stigmas around disabilities and the consequences of Alberta's forgotten experiment in eugenics.

A documentary exploring the "respectable" and "immoral" stereotypes of women in Indian society told from the point of view of 2 strip-tease dancers in a cabaret house in Bombay.

Baseball, Dennis & the French tells the true story of Paul Croshaw, longtime liberal activist and connoisseur of French films, who amazed his family, friends and himself by becoming a churchgoing, conservative Christian after years of listening to nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager.

After delivery of a parcel, on leaving a restaurant, hotel or train, or following an exchange with the customer service department of your telephone operator, the same request: to rate. On a scale from 0 to 10, embellished with colors, or by awarding pretty, playful little stars. A simple, mechanical and painless action for the rater. But behind this harmless gesture lies a brutal management system, operated directly by the customer, without their knowledge. Even more worrying: without knowing it, we are all being rated, to feed the algorithms of opaque companies that claim to be able to predict the future. The film questions this invasion of rating systems, and the consequences of this practice for our individual realities and collective freedoms.

Were the eleven official witnesses—twelve if you include Joseph Smith himself—of the Book of Mormon reliable? What about the unofficial witnesses who interacted with the plates in various ways—including a number of women? Were the plates actually made of gold? How could witnesses really hear the voice of God and yet come to doubt His prophet?

Against the Tide is a travelogue, an examination of modern science, an excursion into history, an autobiography, and more. But at heart, it is the story of one man’s daring stand against the tide of contemporary atheism and its drive to relegate belief in God to society’s catalogue of dead ideas. Join the conversation between Dr. John Lennox—esteemed Oxford professor, mathematician, and philosopher of science—and veteran Hollywood actor and director Kevin Sorbo as they journey from Oxford to Jerusalem and explore the evidence on which Lennox’s Christian faith stands firm.

The film does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two-month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped and later murdered by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the original leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.

A documentary about the confluence of Christianity and mixed martial arts, including ministries which train fighters. The film follows several pastors and popular fighters in their quest to reconcile their faith with a sport that many consider violent and barbaric. Faith is tried and questions are raised. Can you really love your neighbor as yourself and then punch him in the face?

When a lockdown is announced in India, 22-year-old Mahesh finds himself stranded and decides to travel home on a rickety bicycle. He covers about 2,000 kilometers in seven days. It turns him into a national media hype.

Using performance to inspire critical reflection, Promised Paradise delivers fascinating and revealing insight into the social and religious undercurrents dominating Indonesian society today and the Muslim world at large.

Masao Adachi, the author and director of experimental works and pinku-eiga in the 1960s, was a member of the Japanese New Left that shifted from being a filmmaker to a guerrilla fighter. In 1974, he joined the Japanese Red Army in Lebanon, which worked closely with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck met Adachi in Tokyo in 2018 and talked with him about a wide range of topics, including art, revolution, the influence of western avant-garde art and American underground; the Japanese Red Army; collaboration with secret services; the role of the Left after 1968; and the reasons for failures of leftist ideas and strategies.

A meandering brook of moments from two afternoons spent with Vinod Kumar Shukla, his wife and son at their home in Raipur, saunters between the mingling geographies of past, present and future, drifting in and out of pauses – to ponder, to reflect, to reminisce, and to share.

THE PERFUMED GARDEN is an exploration of the myths and realities of sensuality and sexuality in Arab society, a world of taboos and of erotic literature. Through interviews with men and women of all ages, classes, and sexual orientation, the film lifts a corner of the veil that usually shrouds discussion of this subject in the Arab world. Made by an Algerian-French woman director, the film begins by looking at the record of a more permissive history, and ends with the experiences of contemporary lovers from mixed backgrounds. It examines the personal issues raised by the desire for pleasure, amidst societal pressures for chastity and virginity. The film discusses pre-marital sex, courtship and marriage, familial pressures, private vs. public spaces, social taboos (and the desire to break them), and issues of language.

In his new film, Erwin Wagenhofer is looking for the good and beautiful in this world.

Frustrated by watching Black patients suffer due to end-of-life healthcare inequities, two determined allies – a chaplain and a doctor – work to transform a broken medical system, one patient at a time.

When most people think about Australia, they picture massive sandy beaches, singlet-clad locals drinking beer, and kangaroos bounding through the dusty red outback. Saris, musical numbers, and masala are the furthest from anyone's mind - unless of course, you're one of the millions of Bollywood fans from around the world.

Filmmaker Anand Patwardhan looks to history and psychology as he delves into the possible reasons behind the demolition of the Babri Mosque.

As clichés go, in 1999 the World as we knew it was about to change - and we'd been expecting it. Since childhood we'd been promised that the 21st century would bring us dramatic new technologies like flying cars and Utopian cities. Instead it bought us the smart-phone, social media, and virtual societies. And as it turns out these technologies began to transform society almost as dramatically as the moon colonies we'd been expecting. Now over a decade into the revolution, 'DSKNECTD' explores how digital communication technology is profoundly changing the way we interact and experience each other - for the good and for the bad.