About Us

Independent + Award Winning

We are Nandan Saxena & Kavita Bahl – independent filmmakers with over 40 films to our credit, many of them feature-length. After our Masters in English Literature from Delhi University and a diploma in journalism, we started as print journalists, before branching out. 

While Kavita worked for the daily newspaper ‘Indian Express’ for six years, Nandan worked as a news journalist for television. In 1996, we quit our jobs to follow our dreams. Over two decades into filmmaking, our films are rooted in people’s struggles. Our experience as journalists forms the bedrock of our filmmaking. Our work spans the domains of culture, ecology, livelihoods, development, and human rights.

Our Mission Today

Extensive travel in India had brought us face-to-face with issues that are crucial to peoples’ existence but go unreported, unattended to by both media and the powers that be. India’s diversity makes generalisations odious but from the reams of newsprint dedicated to non-issues, simple truths emerge almost axiomatically. Simple truths that talk of hunger and abysmal poverty, degrading living conditions and a sub-human existence that punctures the balloons of India shining.

We wanted to work on these less-oft explored areas. We also wanted to tell the stories of those that did not wait for others but walked alone, and made a difference. There were some issues we were passionate about…

Water is one such issue. Water is one precious resource which most of us believe is infinite, thanks to the 24×7 water in the urban households. Polluted rivers, plummeting ground-water levels, mercury, fluoride contamination in ground-water, drying-up of natural aquifers by over-extraction, failure of National River clean-up plans like the Ganga Action Plan and the Yamuna Action Plan – the callous attitude towards water permeates our lives.

Yet, all is not lost. There are communities and individuals who choose to stand against the tide. Relying on their traditional wisdom and meagre resources, they have managed to mobilise the support of local communities to re-write the script of their lives.

It all starts with one feeling – respecting Mother Nature. Reviving dying rivers, greening deserts, literally going against the book by devising innovative methods of irrigation, reviving India’s traditional wisdom of water harvesting – their exemplary work should be shared with others so that it creates a ripple-effect.

We propose to make a series of documentary-films on such people, communities and their work in India. This would enable the communities, policy-makers and implementers to re-think and perhaps do the needful to bring respect back in our attitude towards water.