For documentary filmmaker Ali Kazimi, our artist in residence this September, a commitment to justice is essential both on- and offscreen. “I know that I can't talk about social responsibility in my films as a theoretical construct and not do anything about it myself, in my life,” he writes. Born and raised in India, Kazimi worked as a freelance photographer in Delhi, then emigrated to Canada after winning a scholarship to the film program at Toronto's York University. Kazimi has consistently trained his camera on those rarely represented onscreen, be they ostracized indigenous groups in India or recent immigrants in Canada. Telling of Indian villagers organizing against a government-sponsored dam, Indo-Canadians participating in arranged marriages, an Iroquois photographer creatively redefining his culture, or a horrific anti-immigrant incident from Canada's past, Kazimi focuses on the relationship between the individual and society, and the power that people have to effect change and defy how others have defined them. “All cultures, including my own,” Kazimi notes, “have borrowed, incorporated, and absorbed influences from all encounters, absorbing, reviving, and at times reinventing themselves.” To redefine and reinvent oneself in the face of internalized cultural pressure or external political power is true empowerment for Kazimi's subjects, and, one senses, for the artist as well.
This series is presented in conjunction with the BAM exhibition Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India.