Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and curator from Mumbai whose work mixes fiction and non-fiction to explore themes of urban life, popular culture, gender, politics and desire. She has made the documentaries Partners in Crime, on culture, copyright, markets and the arts; Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale, on the language of tabloid TV news and moral policing, Q2P,on toilets and the city; Where’s Sandra, a playful exploration of stereotypes of Catholic girls; Work In Progress an impressionistic portrait of the World Social Forum held in Mumbai; Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City, which explores Bombay’s cosmopolitan self image through land and food politics, Un-limited Girls, a personal take on engagements with feminism; A Woman’s Place, about women in India, South Africa and the USA using law to change their lives and communities; and Annapurna, about a women food worker’s cooperative in Bombay’s textile mill area.
Retrospectives of her work have been held at the Lille 3000 festival and Persistence/Resistance, New Delhi. Her films have also been screened at the Tate Modern and the Wellcome Art Gallery in London.
Her films as writer are the internationally released feature Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters and the documentaries A Few Things I Know About Her, If You Pause: In a Museum of Craft, The Stuntmen of Bollywood and Skin Deep.
Her writings have been featured in various anthologies and journals, among them Bombay Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai, Electric Feather: the Tranquebar Book of Contemporary Indian Erotica, Mumbai Noir, Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays, Dreaming Different: New Feminist Writings from Around the World, First Proof: New Writing from India, Signs, The South Asian Journal of Popular Culture and Bioscope. She writes a popular weekly newspaper column and is currently working on a history of Indian documentary as well as a non-fiction book on love in India.
You can read more about her work at www.parodevi.com
