Nina Shivdasani

She started out as a painter, but later turned to photography. She is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York.^[4][5][6] She has exhibited her paintings and her photographs under the title Conceptual Art Imageographs.^[7] She is problaby the first Indian experimental filmmaker.^[8]

Her arthouse film Chhatrabhang (The Divine Plan) won her the first FIPRESCI Award for an Indian film at the 26th Berlin International Film Festival in 1976 and a Maharashtra State Film Award in 1975. The seventy-five-minute color documentary about a caste dilemma in rural India was shot by cameraman Apurba Kishore Bir in two weeks among villagers and edited by Shivdasani over a year. This film is accompanied by music by Edgar Varèse and a commentary written by Vinay Shukla and spoken by Amrish Puri. It was shot on location in Jogiya village and enacted by local villagers.^[2] Chhatrabhang is a Marxist critque of the Indian caste (and class) system, strong and immovable as a rock. There is a recurrent shot of a labourer hammering and breaking apart a large rock as a symbol of changing social times. The "divine plan" of the title is that of the Brhamins who make the other castes serve them. This "partisan film"^[9] ends with a portrait of Baba Saheb and headlines about the killiings of thousands of Harijans (low caste citizens) for having dared to draw water from wells belonging to the Brahmins.^{[citation needed]}

Her 2021 three-hour-long documentary SWA: Source Within Inner Wealth is an experiental exploration inspired by the Taittiriya Upanishad.^[1]

• Breaking Ground (1971)
• A World of all Intelligence (1972)
• Hope No One’s Listening (1972)
• Something about Transformation & Rediscovery aka The Banana Leaf (1972)
• Chhatrabhang (The Divine Plan) (1975)
• SWA: Source Within Inner Wealth (2021)
• Pragyanam (Consciousness) aka Nadh (Resonance) (2023)