the Team

Lalit Vachani’s films include The Boy in the Branch and The Men in the Tree on the RSS and Hindu nationalism; In Search of Gandhi and The Salt Stories follow the trail of Mahatma Gandhi’s salt march in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat; Tales from Napa, about a village that resisted Hindu fundamentalism in Gujarat in 2002; The Play Goes On, about the leftist street theatre group, JANAM; and An Ordinary Election, an in-depth study of an Indian election campaign.

His work has screened widely at international universities and film festivals, which include World Social Forum (Mumbai), Oberhausen Short Film Festival, DOK-Leipzig, IDFA…

Srirupa Roy is professor and chair of State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen, and a founding co-director of ICAS:MP, the Merian-Tagore International Centre for Advanced Studies "Metamorphoses of the Political." (ICAS:MP). Her books include The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism (Stanford University Press, 2024); Saffron Republic: Hindu Nationalism and State Power in India (with Thomas Blom Hansen, Cambridge University Press, 2022); Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India (with Alev Çinar and Maha Yahya, (University of Michigan Press, 2012); Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke…

Rikhav Desai is a film editor in Mumbai. He edits documentary, video art installations, and fiction. Edited short films include Ladies Special (directed by Nidhi Tuli), Happy Hookers (Ashish Sawhny), Water and a City (Swati Dandekar), Fried Fish Chicken Soup and a Premiere Show (Mamta Murthy), Vertical City (Avijit Mukul Kishore), and Finding Carlton (Susheel Kurien). His edited documentary features include To Let the World In (Avijit Mukul Kishore), Many Months in Mirya, and The Ebb Tide (Renu Savant), Neeli Raag (Swati Dandekar), Lovely Villa ( Rohan Shivkumar) and Bread & Belonging (Sonia Filinto).

Rikhav co-scripted and co-edited Had-Anhad under The Kabir Project with filmmaker Shabnam Virmani, and…

Amit Mahanti is a filmmaker, cinematographer and editor based in New Delhi. He has worked on films and video installations that explore questions of ecological transformation, culture and politics. His films include Every Time You Tell A Story, Scratches On Stone and Two Autumns in Wyszogród and have been screened at numerous film festivals.

Amit has also been selected for art/film residency programs at Khoj Studios (New Delhi), Parco Arte Vivente Experimental Centre of Contemporary Art (Turin), Kran Film (Brussels) and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw).

His work has been exhibited at group shows at Khoj Studios (Delhi), PAV…

Lohit Bhalla is a sound engineer based in Delhi and a graduate of SACAC's audio engineering program. His passion for the power of sound to transport people to different worlds and evoke powerful emotions led him to pursue a career in sound engineering, where he has worked in various disciplines, including sound design, live sound engineering, field sound recording and podcasting.

Over the past seven years, Lohit has worked at Depot Records, (the studio owned by the well-known sound engineer Girjashanker Vohra), on a range of projects, from recording and mixing sound for films to collaborating with musicians from different parts of…

Alishan Jafri is an independent journalist based in New Delhi. He writes on human rights, media, disinformation and the rise of extreme politics in India. He has features in various national and international media including the BBC, DW, Al Jazeera and Codastory. He is the recipient of the 2022 ACJ award for Social Impact Journalism (along with Neel Madhav) for their story in The Caravan-  Clicks and Bait: How a constellation of far-right Hindi YouTubers determine what you see on your TV.

Founded in 1983, Concept-AV is a state of the art production company based in Kreuzberg, Berlin. It offers cutting-edge technology and staffs highly skilled personnel to undertake all aspects of video production – from research, to production, filming, logging and archiving, video editing and color grading, sound recording and processing, audio and video post-production services, to DCP and Blu-ray creation and distribution for television and news productions, documentaries, film festival exhibition and streaming on social media and the internet.

Atul Anand is a media researcher and practitioner working across documentary films, videos, photography, visual essays, and ethnographic research. His works address issues of migration, labor, and social justice. With a focus on ethical representation, he collaborates with marginalized communities to challenge mainstream societal narratives. Through visual media, he aims to spark conversations and raise awareness on social issues.