Chhattisgraph Sketches

Directed by Jon Jost

CHHATTISGARH SKETCHES is a videographic notebook of a journey in India in the spring of 2003. It was made during brief periods free while I was conducting a practical digital video workshop in the small city of Raipur, in Chhattisgarh, in an out-reach program intended to provide lower-caste and tribals access to, and experience with, digital video. Most of the material in this work was made during weekend trips to the villages of the students, who invited me to stay with them. As such the film is an impressionistic glimpse of a non-touristic area of India, one of its poorer and less developed regions. It was my intention to capture more the “spirit” or “sense” of the place - the languid pacing of time, the light, the richness of color - than in any sense to make a clinical “documentary” about it. Included in the film, at the end, is a sequence of shots made by my students during the workshop conducted in Raipur.