Marathi with English subtitles

Tambaku Chaakila Oob Ali (Tobacco Embers) traces the history and strike actions of the all-women trade union representing over 3,000 tobacco workers in Nipani, Karnataka. The film was made in collaboration with female tobacco factory workers. It documents, re-enacts and takes forward one of the largest movements of unorganised labour of its time and in that context, which sparked unionisation processes across Karnataka and Maharashtra throughout the 1980s.

Attracted by the power of these large-scale strike actions provoked by women workers and in the spirit of mobilisation for the left labour and women’s movement, the Yugantar film collective embarked on their second film. The collective spent four months with women working in tobacco factories in Nipani, listening to their accounts of exploitative working conditions and discussing strategies for unionising, as well as concrete steps to broaden solidarity across factories in order to organise massive strike actions. Through this collaboration, the film team was able to capture circumstances inside factories hitherto unrepresented on screen. They followed the women workers’ leads as to what, where and how their actions should be recorded. The film collective developed a loose script based on the workers’ narratives.

Yugantar’s continuous commitment to the complexity of political friendships and how to “stand with” provoked a then pioneering collaborative filmmaking practice embodied in large scale re-enactments of protests and voice-overs offering a pluriverse testimony. Notably, this production marks the first time that working-class women are depicted organising and “speaking to power” on screen. This film is a powerful example of a feminist Third Cinema, a factory film, also called a “strike manual” by current union activists.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with María Barea (in English).

• Sektion Section: Film
• Programm Programme: they gave us flames, we made a fire 4