On ‘The Fifth Wall’: a digital archive | Navina Sundaram

Merle Kröger, novelist, screenwriter and film producer, lives in Berlin. Together with filmmaker Philip Scheffner, she has been making documentary feature films since 2007. Kröger and Scheffner are co-founders of ‘pong’, a production company with a focus on creative documentary films and videos supported by diverse cultural institutions. In her novels, Kröger combines historical research, personal history and political analysis with elements of crime literature. As curator of the transnational cultural project ‘Import Export: Cultural Transfer between India and Germany’, Austria (2005), she began a long-term collaboration with the filmmaker and television journalist Navina Sundaram.

Deepa Dhanraj is a researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker. She was one of the founding members of Yugantar, a feminist film collective that made films centring the political organizing of women domestic and factory workers. She is a founding member of The Oral History Association of India. She is co-author, with K. Lalita, of Rupture, Loss and Living: Minority women speak about post conflict life (2016) – a collection of oral narratives of Muslim women survivors of sectarian violence. Dhanraj is currently working on an audio-visual archive of the anti-caste students’ movement that arose in 2016 after the suicide of the Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula.

Sashi Kumar is a journalist, filmmaker and media entrepreneur. He founded and chairs the Media Development Foundation which administers the Asian College of Journalism. He was among the earliest newscasters in English on India’s national television, Doordarshan, and has anchored and produced numerous shows, documentaries and features for Doordarshan. In 1992 he launched Asianet, India’s first satellite TV channel in a regional language (Malayalam) and the first state-wide cable TV network in Kerala. In 2004 he scripted and directed Kaya Taran, a film based on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Volker Pantenburg is a professor of Film Studies at the University of Zürich. He has published widely on essayistic film and video practices, experimental cinema and contemporary moving image installations. His books in English include Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory (2015), Cinematographic Objects: Things and Operations (2015, editor) and Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (2012, co-editor). In 2015, he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut – a platform to engage with Farocki’s practice, and initiate projects that explore contemporary media and image cultures – where he is currently involved in a research project around  Skip Norman’s life and work.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker and cultural producer living in Mumbai. She was executive director of Majlis Cultural Centre, Mumbai, from 1998 to 2016, and artistic director of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne, Germany from 2018 to 2021. Her non-fiction films address issues of citizenry, identity, memory practices, urban cultures and public cultures. Madhusree Dutta has initiated several analogous and digital archive projects in India and Germany. She has been awarded, nationally and internationally, for her films, activism and arts management.

Acknowledgements

Merle Kröger and Philip Scheffner (pong, Berlin), Mareike Bernien
English translation and subtitling by Rubaica Jaliwala and Onir (Anticlock Films, Mumbai)
Support for English translation and subtitling, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan