Eight years ago, I was filming a conversation between two South Asian women. A Pakistani-American was telling an Indian-American a horrific and agonizing story about how the narrator’s mother had barely survived the violence of the 1947 partition of British India. You are not alone if your history is a little hazy. I knew the outlines of that history but never appreciated the magnitude. Fifteen million people were displaced, and one million people died in less than six months in the largest forced migration in history. I realized that the recording I had been doing was not just a documentation of her creative process but a vital story calling out to be turned into a coherent motion picture to be widely shared.
UNMUTED takes audiences deep into the life and practice of the artist Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, whose artwork originates from her life experience. We see how she makes art and undertakes activism, simultaneously forms of resistance, serious play, and social care. From analog photography, through digital imaging to video projects, and ultimately to installation art, the film showcases this major photographic artist manipulating dominant tropes in photography and history to explicitly and expressively push back against the “civilized” violence of Western narratives.
A major theme of the film is silence. We learn how Matthew, in her life’s journey, found her own voice in art and learned to help underrepresented groups unmute their voices so they could tell their otherwise unheard stories. The film raises important questions about power and cultural erasure by focusing on one artist and the communities she collaborates with, both under-represented in the media and our more significant cultural conversations. Mobilizing her personal story and intuitions, Matthew’s paradigm-shifting work is seen to unmute previously unheard stories in service to the underrepresented in society. At a moment when immigrants and refugees are under attack when misogyny is expanding across the globe, this film is more important than ever.
This film is made possible with the generous support of:
Derek Freese Documentary Fund
Rhode Island State Council on the Arts
Rhode Island Council for the Humanities
