Feminist Fightback Film club presents: Ye Lo Bayaan Humare

Ye Lo Bayaan Humare | And We Were There 1967-1977

Hindi/Bengali/English | 142 mins (in 2 parts) | 2021

Directed by Uma Chakravarti

This is a film about the idealism, passion and the jail time of young women coming of age in the late 1960s, seeking to change the world, and throwing themselves into movements sweeping parts of India. Hounded for their activities, tortured by the police and incarcerated in jails, these women found a camaraderie that went beyond revolutionary ideology that had inspired them. As the late sixties gave way to the seventies, the Emergency was imposed across India, and the number of women who went to jail for their political idealism expanded to many cities, small towns, and villages across the country.

The film tells the stories of fifteen young women, moving across Bengal and Bihar to Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and Bangalore. Yeh Lo Bayaan Humaare is built around these women’s stories, narrated by them to the director in the mid 2010s. It is the story of their resistance and refusal to be broken by the repression unleashed by the state. It is also the poignant story of reflection, loss and death in those troubled times.

The film includes valuable archives from the 1970s in the form of film clips, documents, Fact Finding Reports, news stories, diaries and assorted personal archives. It is the only visual testament of its kind to a dark period in modern Indian history, when the country went through violent turmoil, eventually descending overnight into a dictatorship.

This screening will be co-hosted by London South Bank University’s Race, Gender and Sexualities Research Group and Crime and Justice Research Group, and Feminist Fightback.

Free, but donations on the day very welcome.

To avoid disappointment on the day please register via Eventbrite.