Mardana's Children
Director: Nathan Drillot
Country: United Kingdom, Pakistan
Language: English| Hindi| Punjabi | Urdu
Year: 2024
Run Time: 18 mins
Traversing Boundaries of Religion and Nation, Rababis Make Divine Music
A short film on the Rababis of Lahore, a community of Pakistani Muslim musicians with deep-rooted ties to the Sikhs by way of a centuries-old music tradition. Mardana's Children traces the current descendants of Bhai Mardana (the 15th century musician and disciple of Guru Nanak), piecing together a story of shared devotion across India and Pakistan, traversing the modern boundaries of religion and nation, and highlighting the unifying power of music in the face of the divisive legacy of identity politics and the partition of 1947.
Director:
Nathan Drillot is an award-winning director, cinematographer, and co-founder of the Vancouver-based production house Salazar. Working across 21 countries, his filmmaking bridges intimate independent documentary, music culture and commercial storytelling. Nathan is best known for directing the Hot Docs premiere and Netflix-distributed feature Wizard Mode (2016), the international Viceland docuseries The Wrestlers (2019), and the acclaimed short Handsome and Majestic (2015).
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No Space to Pray
Filmmakers: Raunaq Singh Chopra & Devanshi Yadav
Country: India
Language: Hindi |Urdu
Year: 2025
Run Time: 40 mins
No Space to Pray for Muslims in Delhi’s Premium Satellite City
The Muslim community in Gurugram, a satellite city of New Delhi, faces a severe shortage of mosques. With only 13 mosques serving a Muslim population of over 500,000, they are left with no choice but to use empty plots, car parks, and open fields as makeshift prayer grounds for weekly congregational prayers. Their attempts to secure land for new mosques have been repeatedly blocked by the local administration, which, in turn, faces opposition from right-wing groups and residents' associations. Following both sides, the film delves into what it means to be a Muslim in new India—one increasingly shaped by the rise of Islamophobia.
Director(s):
Raunaq Singh Chopra is a cinematographer and director with over a decade of experience in the non-fiction space. An alumni of AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, he has produced and shot documentaries on a range of subjects including climate change, crime and culture for media outlets such as the New York Times, Vox, Vice & Bloomberg.
With over a decade of experience in production, Devanshi Yadav, an NID Ahmedabad alumnus, has worked across a wide range of content, including award-winning TV documentaries and commercials. She began her career producing documentaries for Discovery Channel India, before joining Unscripted by ScoopWhoop as a Senior Producer, where she wrote, shot, and produced various non-fiction formats. Currently, she is working with Girl Effect where she produces creative solutions for adolescent girls and boys.
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