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  • Documentary
  • Land
  • Highlights 00:50

Reaping a Revolution

In a village in Perambalur district, a union of women farmers is bringing millets back to fields worn out by cotton and chemicals.

Details

Format
Documentary
Length
18 min
Now showing
Highlights · 00:50
Filmed in
Perambalur district, Tamil Nadu
Subtitles
English

About the film

When we hear the word farmer, the film begins, we picture a man: a turban, a vest, a twirled moustache. Why can we never imagine a woman?

In Perambalur district, cotton and maize brought early profits, then pesticides, rising costs and exhausted soil. Reaping a Revolution follows the farmers of the Veppoor region who are turning back to millets, the crop their grandparents grew, and to farming without chemicals.

At its centre is the Nammazhvar Sangam, a farmers’ union managed and led by women. They sow, harvest, pack and sell their own grain, and they set their own prices.

Highlights

4 moments

Reaping a Revolution

“Why can’t we ever imagine a woman to be a farmer?”
Narration

Reaping a Revolution

“This group is managed, administered, and decision making is all led by women farmers.”
Narration

Reaping a Revolution

“It is not a question of possibility, rather it is a question of need.”
From the film

Reaping a Revolution

“This small change has all the potential to become a revolution.”
Narration

Stills

12 frames

Five women in bright saris walk in single file through scrubland and fields.
Women farmers on their way to the fields.
A smiling elderly farmer in a red checked turban holds the reins of a white bullock.
A farmer and his bullock.
A man in a woollen cap bends over a field of grain, lit from behind by a low sun.
Working a field of grain at first light.
A tractor pulls a trailer full of women farmers beneath a spreading tree.
A trailer of women farmers heads out to work.
A black and white image of a farmer ploughing with two bullocks on an open plain below rocky hills.
Ploughing below the hills.
Women and a few men sit in a circle of plastic chairs in a room stacked with grain sacks.
A meeting of the farmers' union.
An older woman with grey hair laughs during a meeting, other women seated behind her.
Laughter at a union meeting.
A boy stands looking up at the sky in a field of tall grain while a woman bends to work beside him.
A boy looks up while his mother works.
An aerial view of small fields in many shades of green and red, divided by a winding path.
A patchwork of small fields.
Two women in headscarves stand beside milling machinery, one looking straight at the camera.
Two women beside a grain mill.
A stream of millet grain pours onto a heap inside a mill.
Millet, poured out for milling.
Tall millet stalks in silhouette against an orange sky at dusk.
Millet at dusk.

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Studio
Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu