Pankaj Sekhsaria oversees three-day hand-spinning workshops conducted by Madhav Sahasrabudhe at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. He shot one of them on a mobile phone for the purposes of creating a record with an ethnographic and instinctive approach. Much later he thought of turning it into a film in response to a call by KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, published by the University of Victoria Libraries for multimodal contributions.
RD edited more than three hours of footage into a short documentary film with Free and Open Source Software (Blender, Inkscape, Gimp). The film’s screenings in academia and film festivals has drawn an unexpectedly warm and positive response.
Is the charkha an obsolete and irrelevant technology? Is it a slow and un-productive relic of the past that we remember only because of Gandhi or its role in the freedom struggle? Can it play any role at all in the many crises we are facing today?
The Spinning Experience follows 30 IIT Bombay students while they learn the slow and gentle art of hand-spinning on the charkha over three days and engage with these and other questions as they go along. One sees a churn of the narrative through a combination of discussion and debate but more importantly experiential learning and the possibility of creating tacit knowledge and understanding. Learning unfolds in unexpected ways. The yarn breaks regularly but then the rhythm begins to set in and new understandings are created for ideas of skill, labour, history, craft and sustainability.
The highlight of course is a small length of cotton yarn students take with them as a real tangible output of what they have ‘created’ themselves.
Full Festival Kit available on Filmfreeway.com
The Spinning Experience: Hand Spinning as
Pedagogy, Experiential Learning, and Physical Output
is included in KULA Issue Vol. 8 No. 2 (2025): Multimodal Scholarship
Citation https://kula.uvic.ca/index.php/kula/article/view/253
Selection/ Screenings:
- In competition
4th West Bengal Short Film Festival 2025
Kolkata, India - Winner, Best Screenplay (Documentary)
12th Goa Short Film Festival 2025
Panjim, India
2025, November 15-16 - In competition
16th Sundarban International Film Festival
Kolkata, India - Official Selection
22nd Indian Film Festival Stuttgart
Screened at Innenstadtkinos, Linden Museum
Stuttgart, Germany
2025, August 27
Festival Promo - Official Selection
Frome International Climate Film Festival 2025
Somerset, United Kingdom
2025, May 18 - Official competition
5th Kerala Short Film Festival (India) 2025
Ernakulam (Kochi), Kerala, India
2025, March 29
Indian film festival premier. - Rishi Valley School, via Madanapalle, India.
“KFI Teachers’ Conference: Teachers in a Krishnamurti School – Reaching Beyond Curriculum and Pedagogy”. Plenary presentation screening at Pune for School teachers.
Pune, MH, India.
2024, November 25 - IIT Mandi, India.
“4th Young Graduate Meet, 2024 – Interdisciplinary Approaches to South-Asian Ecology”. Plenary Talk.
Mumbai, MH, India
2024, October 25 - Nag Auditorium, VMCC, IIT Bombay, India.
“Sustainable Rural Development: Empowering Communities for Progress” Session 4: Learning with Gandhi: Experiments in Contemporary Education in India.
Mumbai, MH, India.
2024, October 5
