AAA–Inlaks Artist Grantee 2022: Sudha Padmaja Francis
Sudha Padmaja Francis is the 2022 AAA-Inlaks Artist Grantee. Francis is a filmmaker/visual artist from Kerala, India. She graduated with a Masters in Creative Enterprise (Film) from the University of Reading in 2017. She is a recipient of the Felix scholarship for 2016–17. She completed her first short film in Malayalam, titled Eye Test, in 2017. Eye Test won the National Film Award for Best Cinematography in 2017, and was screened at several international film festivals. Francis’s 26-minute documentary film, Ormajeevikal (Memory Beings), on the subaltern musical realm in North Kerala, was made with the help of a PSBT-Doordarshan Fellowship, and shortlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award 2020. Her documentary on weaving cooperative societies in Kerala with the Sahapedia Early Career Filmmaking Grant. Her video series on life during the pandemic and lockdown was shown at Bienal Sur, and her recent video essay Walkway was shown at the Oberhausen Film Festival 2022.
Malabar Bakery, Kannur, 2022. Still footage credit: Kama K.M. Image courtesy of Sudha Padmaja Francis.
Francis’s project for the grant, Cook-Booking through a History of Baking in the Malabar, proposes to produce an archive around the history of culture and labour in bakeries located in northern Kerala. The research project and non-fiction film that Francis intends to produce in the process become a way for her to explore the specificity of the relationship between food and caste in Kerala, given how food functions as one of the crucial modalities of experience that structurally perpetuates notions of purity. Francis will attempt to explore the history of baking in Kerala and its lower caste origins through this project. The archive generated from this research will be activated to explore questions of hierarchy, caste, labour, class, and gender in the subcultural realm of small-time baking in North Kerala.
Krishna Bakery, Kuttichira, Kozhikode, 2022. Still footage credit: Kama K.M. Image courtesy of Sudha Padmaja Francis.
For this project, Francis will collect documents such as cookbooks and recipe-books used by small bakeries and their families, as well as audio-visual material such as still photographs, film footage, and interviews with communities associated with baking. The background research for this film will produce a complex layer of archival materials, which includes excess footage. These will be starting points to think imaginatively and critically about mobilising research and engagement out of such an endeavour.
This is the third grant made possible through the collaboration between AAA in India and Inlaks India Foundation. For this edition of the year-long art grant, the jury—which included the Santiniketan-based artist and educator Sanchayan Ghosh, and the Delhi-based curator Vidya Shivadas, along with members of AAA in India and Inlaks India Foundation.
Cover Image: Archival image of Malabar Bakery, Kannur from circa 1917. Photographer Unknown. Image courtesy of Sudha Padmaja Francis and Kama K.M.
