Johnson Rajkumar

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA under Explorations will explore with the making of a short experimental film edit looking at the Meira Paibi women's movement in Manipur, focusing on their night shelters (Shang) using ambiguity and montage to reveal intimate, resilient complexities. Johnson Rajkumar is the Coordinator for this project. 

Johnson Rajkumar is a documentary filmmaker, film archivist, and academic based in Imphal, Manipur, whose work operates at the intersections of cultural memory, and visual anthropology. Holding a PhD in Mass Communication from Manipur University, he currently serves as Guest Faculty at the university's Department of Mass Communication. Concurrently, he is a Consultant Film Conservator for the Manipur State Film Development Society, where he established the SN Chand Cine Archive and Museum, the state's first film archive. His archival work is critically important, including setting up the first state-owned film conservation laboratory in India , digitising the first Manipuri film Brojendragee Luhongba (1972), and coordinating the restoration of Ishanou (1990), which screened at Cannes Classics in 2023. As a filmmaker, he directed the documentary Fireflies, based on the Meira Paibi of Manipur, which won Best Documentary Short at the Arthouse Asia International Film Festival (2018). A recipient of the Champions of Film Heritage Award, Johnson is committed to developing ethical cinematic methodologies grounded in community histories and lived realities. Given his experience, Johnson Rajkumar is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The project titled Chronicles of Winter Nights will be a short experimental film edit, focusing on the Meira Paibi (women torchbearers) movement in Manipur. The project deliberately will move beyond a purely political or heroic framing of this grassroots activism, which sees women vigilantly patrolling their neighbourhoods against violence and injustice, to instead illuminate the Shang (night shelters) as intimate spaces. These shelters are recognised not just as sites of political resistance, but as vital personal spaces offering emotional refuge, social solidarity, humour, and quiet resilience amidst a conflict zone. The film will consciously reject didactic or linear storytelling in favour of an "aesthetic of ambiguity," resisting simplistic moral binaries and valourised interpretations of the women's complex lived experiences. It will seek to open a space for deeper, more ethical engagement by embracing nuance and contradiction, acknowledging that the women's realities often exceed easy representation. The artistic aim will be to witness and listen, challenging the perception of the winter night as a time of vulnerability and reframing it as a space of collective strength and empowerment within the Shang.

The project will employ a distinct cinematic language focusing on an episodic, fragmentary structure and the use of intellectual montage as a spatial dialectic. The focus will cast upon the obscure, liminal hours of Manipuri winter nights, capturing a sensory landscape dominated by the torch, whispering voices, and silence. Each Shang will be treated as a discrete cinematic unit, akin to a "shot" in a montage sequence, a unit of space and memory. The film will juxtapose fragments of conversations, silences, laughter, anger, and dreams from different Shangs. The exploratory phase will focus on field research, sensitive interviews, audio-visual experimentation with night filming, and montage trials.

The outcome of the project will be the field research, interviews, and night filming with audio-visual experimentation. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be an audio-visual documentation of the artistic process and the short experimental film edit.   

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Practice programme in the manner in which it attempts to break away from the documentary form to assimilate the lived quality of space of women’s gatherings in winter nights, as an attempt to capture through film, the intangible energies of a politically charged space.    

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm by convening an online gathering of artists coordinating Explorations projects. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is supported by Parijat Foundation.