The Oxford Ethnographic Film Society at Linacre College presents:

Acclaimed filmmaker Margaret Dickerson will be present for a screening and discussion session on her recent film, ‘Women Builders’ – which centers on the experience of women labourers in India (read on for further description of the film, and the development project which spurred it).

Wednesday 9 March 2005
8pm, Tanner Room, Linacre College
(Linacre is located at the corner of St. Cross and South Parks Roads)



WOMEN BUILDERS

Women do much of the unskilled work on construction sites in India. Most are casual labourers and hardly any are unionised. Women Builders provides snapshots from the lives of four such women working together on a large building site in the Central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

In some other states there are small scale initiatives to improve conditions of workers, and the second part of the film focuses on two such organisations in Ahmedebad: the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), who run an insurance scheme and a skills training course, and a small trade union concentrates on helping tribal migrants to improve living and working conditions.

At a national level new legislation has been introduced which, if implemented, would address key problems to do with safety, health and welfare. The film concludes with commentary from an activist and an official on the new laws.


FILMMAKER AND ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION

‘Women Builders’ was commissioned by the International Labor Organisation (ILO) in consultation with the International Federation of Building and Woodworkers (IFBWW). The ILO had previously commissioned a shorter health and safety film from the same team. The director and crew were from Jandarshan, a community video unit based in Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh State. The producer, Margaret Dickinson, is from UK and had co-ordinated an EU funded project which had provided training for the people who now staff the Jandarshan Unit. During the project she had also done some of the teaching, together with Indian and other European staff and therefore knew the students, now the staff of Jandarshan, quite well. A further relevant connection is that the idea for the original EU project had been influenced by the fact that Margaret’s Husband, the anthropologist Jonathan Parry, who had done field work in Bhilai, a major steel town 25 km from Raipur.

These factors can be seen to influence the film. The IFBWW had wanted a film to focus more closely on the work of their affiliates and indeed subsequently commissioned another film from Jandarshan, ‘Labouring Brick by Brick,’ which uses more of the footage on the Ahmedebad trade union shot for Women Builders plus material on other IFBWW affiliates in other states. Margaret and the ILO officer who gave the commission were more interested in showing the normal situation where there is no formal organisation among the labourers. The crew speak Chhattisgarhi and Hindi but not Gujarati and were therefore much more comfortable shooting in Chhattisgarh.

The introduction to the building workers on the Chhattisgarh sites came from Jonathan Parry and his research assistant, ( Ajay T.G. who had previously been trained in video along with the Jandarshan crew); the introduction to workers in Gujarat came from SEWA and the local IFBWW affiliate. The results and the process of production raise a series of questions about documentary film and about unorganised labour and the various agendas of activists, ethnographers, politicians, the labourers and their employers.