Ayisha Abraham

Through the Dark Mine

Made from footage gathered by historian Janaki Nair,sheds light on what lies thousands of feet beneath the surface of the earth,deep beyond the dark hole visible from above. The camera follows the mine workers as they extract ore for gold,revealing what lies beyond the black sun.

I Saw a God Dance

I Saw a God Dance has a serendipitous beginning that take us all the way back to 1938, when Tom D’aguiar filmed the Indian choreographer and dancer Ram Gopal in his youth, dancing on the terrace of his large bungalow in Bangalore. Abraham found this footage by accident in a plastic bag in D’aguiar’s house (on whom Abraham made her film Straight , and she revisits the deteriorating footage of Ram Gopal ten years later to embark on a different exploration of another man and his professional and personal quests. Bringing together the heavily blemished 8mm footage with photographs, documents, reviews, audio, and recent interviews with those who knew him, I Saw a God Dance conjures Ram Gopal’s life from disparate archival fragments.

enroute or “of a Thousand Moons”

En Route or of a Thousand Moons presents a speckled and staccato view of post colonial India’s visual histories. Removed from contexts of their time and space, these images acts as apparitions of India’s past that remain hidden in the obsolescence of their material life. The film puts us face to face with a private world of picnics, birthday parties, and interior lives, worlds that been hidden and preserved in deteriorating and aged film, offering a meditation of fragmented and alternative view of India’s histories.

You are Here

A disjunctive montage of freckled 8mm home movies and jarring sounds of everyday life, You are Here conjures a day in the life of mid-century India. The film maps the fragility of its 8 mm material with the specters of India’s modernity—the array of shots of the world through windows of vehicles, moving trains, balloons in air, busy bridges, flowing water bodies, sites of worship, and ordinary people in their everyday activities.

The State of the World

An omnibus project examining, well, the state of the world.

One Way

Contemporary economic conditions in Nepal are examined with documentary images, interviews, and narration. There has been, for many years, a labour migration from across Nepal to India ’s cities. This short film is set in the underground parking lot of an apartment building in Bangalore, in South India. One Way follows the livelihood of a security guard named Shyam Bahadur, who lives with the rest of his family in the electric switching room of an apartment block, to whom he provides service for the sake of survival. The narrative of the journey he made 35 years ago, from the mountains of Nepal to the southern plateau of Bangalore, punctuates his day-to-day life in and out of the basement. As his personal story unfolds, the hills of Nepal are being rocked by “the people’s war,” yet another historical disturbances that has forced Nepalis to emigrate for work.

Straight 8

Straight 8 is an exploration of a collection of 8mm home movies of film enthusiast Tom D’aguiar, an Anglo-Indian who lived in Bangalore. Drawn from home movies made around the 1940s, we see scenes of everyday life around Tom’s house including amateur fictional thrillers shot with his friends and graceful dances of the renowned figure Ram Gopal. Instead of a nostalgic re-presentation of the past, the video creates montages of everyday personal life strung together with personal anecdotes that indicate a precision about the domesticated use of technology. Through its enigmatic grainy images, Straight 8 evokes an enticing realm of memory and imagination that governs the relations technology, creativity, and ordinary lives of people.