The Department of History invites you to a screening of Lalit Vachani's Prisoner No. 626710 is Present.
The Screening will take place on Feb 11, 2025 at 5.00 pm in Watson Hall, Room 517 and will be followed by a Q&A period with the director.
Film Synopsis
On September 13, 2020, Umar Khalid, a charismatic student leader who recently completed his PhD at India’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, was arrested under the draconian UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act)—a law that designates individuals as terrorists and allows the Indian state to imprison people without due process. His crime? As an Indian Muslim, he had dared to protest against the new citizenship law that the Indian state was trying to impose on its people
Using found footage of his past speeches along with a forensic analysis of how he was framed by the right-wing, Hindu nationalist media, Umar Khalid’s close friends, Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, reconstruct the chronology of events that led to his tragic imprisonment. It has been over 1,400 days since Umar Khalid was arrested. He and his friends still await a fair hearing in court. The film won the SiGNS Cinema of Resistance Award in 2024. You may watch the trailer .
is a documentary filmmaker, lecturer and research scholar at CeMIS (the Centre for Modern Indian Studies) at the University of Göttingen. He has taught on topics related to film analysis, media, politics and the documentary film at the Mass Communication Research Centre in Delhi, India; at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and at Amherst College in the USA, and has held visiting appointments at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University, the Max Planck Institute for Religious Diversity and at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg in Göttingen.
His documentaries include In Search of Gandhi (2007) and The Salt Stories (2009) which follow the trail of Gandhi's salt march in Narendra's Modi's Gujarat; The Play Goes On (2005) on the leftist street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch; An Ordinary Election (2015), an in-depth study of an Indian election campaign by a new political party – the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party); and The Boy in the Branch (1993) and The Men in the Tree (2002) which document the ideology and the growth of the RSS and Hindu nationalism.
