'Working Girls' - a documentary film screening and Q & A with director Paromita Vohra

About the film

Working Girls is a vivid, genre-defying documentary that traverses India to uncover the invisible yet essential work performed by women — from care work and domestic work to surrogacy and sex work. Filmed in Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong, Latur, Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad and Madurai, the film meets domestic workers, farmers, mothers, ASHA workers, dancers, and organisers whose labour sustains society but is rarely acknowledged.

With biting humour, powerful music, and a deep dive into the histories of law and gender,

Working Girls challenges dominant ideas about labour, value, and visibility.

Directed by Paromita Vohra and created in collaboration with the Laws of Social Reproduction project, building on their research, the film invites us to rethink what it means to work — and who gets to be seen as a worker. 

This event is co-hosted by the Global Legal Studies and Equality, Gender, and Feminist Legal Studies research themes at Birmingham Law School.

Credits

• Writer-Director Paromita Vohra
• Concept Prabha Kotiswaran
• Camera Avijit Mukul Kishore
• Editing Nishant Radhakrishnan, Sankalp Meshram
• Sound Achuth Sahadevan, Namshad Hameed, Rajesh Saseendran, Sneha Sundar and others
• Music Bonnie Chakraborty
• Sound Mix Gissy Michael

About the director

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer and committed antakshari player whose extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations and television programming, explore feminism, gender, desire, urban life and popular culture. She is the director of several documentaries including Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra?, Morality TV and the Loving Jehad, Partners in Crime and most recently Working Girls. She has written the film Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters, the comic Priya’s Mirror, the play Ishqiya Dharavi Ishtyle and a weekly newspaper column Paronormal Activity, which she wrote for 15 years.

In 2015 she founded Agents of Ishq, a pioneering digital platform which has transformed conversations on sex, love and desire in India.

• Website: www.parodevipictures.com
• Twitter- @parodevi
• Instagram- @bombay.rosie

About the laws of social reproduction project

The Laws of Social Reproduction project hosted by the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, draws on feminist legal theory and interdisciplinary methodologies to study female reproductive labour, including unpaid domestic work as well as abject forms of labour performed by women outside of the institution of marriage and for the market, namely, sex work, erotic dancing, surrogacy, egg donation, and paid domestic work. The project is conceived by the professor of law, Prabha Kotiswaran.

The project demonstrates the law’s key role in making invisible women’s reproductive labour in these sectors, while also comparing the differences in the law’s regulation of these apparently varied forms of labour. Ultimately, the project proposes a holistic understanding of reproductive labour towards engendering reform that can further economic justice for women.

The Laws of Social Reproduction project is generously funded by a 2017 European Research Council Consolidator Grant and has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946).

Reviews

“To understand Working Girls is also to trace it back to Unlimited Girls, Vohra’s landmark 2002 documentary on feminism in urban India. That film upended the documentary form with a feminist chatroom, big ads and cool music. That openness, where feminist thought could be funny, complex, even romantic, has laid the foundation for her latest work. If the former foregrounded the feminist self, the latter roots that self in a web of economic, legal and caste realities. The journey from Unlimited Girls to Working Girls is a political one with unflinching gazes, collective spirit, spontaneous laughter and moments of solitude.”

• Prachi Satrawal, The New Indian Express

“What is most breathtaking is how Working Girls is steeped in the chutzpah of the women whose lives it follows. Right next to heartbreaks are also bonds of affection and the solidarity of sisterhood. In the thick of everyday struggles to survive, there were moments of exquisite pleasure: felt, expressed, witnessed in their bodies, their glances, their touch. Their wit and sense of irony compel us to re-examine not just what, but how we define the sacred and profane. The delicate camera movements, holding space for their personal and intimate moments, make the scenes particularly extraordinary.”

-Arundhati Ghosh, The News Minute

"Paromita doesn’t just show the fearlessness in these girls; she lingers in its presence, and like us, is humbled by it."

-Ayana Jade Hayward, The Open Dosa