Sandeep Balhara
Poland, India
2014 | 0:13:15

“Cotton Dreams” is story of Radhabai Marape, whose husband committed suicide on 22nd July 2013. She has been trying to cope up with the newborn hardships in her life, along with her 5 children. The debt, which forced her husband to end his life, is now haunting her. In the backdrop of this underdeveloped village Thangoan’s non-human conditions, we get to see an sad love story of a couple.

According to National Records Bureau, more than 250,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 15 years—the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. As a result of new economic reforms in late 90s in India, Indian cotton farmers were thrust into competition with the international market, which forced them to use expensive biotech inputs. These inputs came with the promise of producing higher yields and providing greater resistance against pests. They often fail to live up to these promises, driving farmers into further debt as they failed to produce enough crop to make up for rising input costs. Drastic climate changes also create havoc on already suffering farmers. Often the only way out is to take on more loans and buy more inputs, which in turn can lead to even greater debt. Indebtedness is a major and proximate cause of farmer suicides in India

Phillipe Warnel
Great Britain, Belgium, USA
2014 | 1:11:00

Ming of Harlem is an only-in-New-York account of Ming, Al, and Antoine Yates, who cohabited in a high-rise social housing apartment at Drew-Hamilton complex in Harlem for several years until 2003, when news of their dwelling caused a public outcry and collective outpouring of disbelief. On the discovery that Ming was a 500-pound pound Tiger and Al a seven-foot alligator, their story took on an astonishing dimension. The film frames Yates’s recollections with a poetic study of Ming and Al, the predators’ presence combined with a text by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, reimagining the circumstances of the wild inside, animal names, strange territories, and human-animal relations.