EAEFF presents ‘The Canopies Diagram: A Forum for Ecological and Folkloric Thinking Within Cinematic Practice, 2026’, a one-day workshop by Kaddukkas.
24, September, 2026
11 AM – 5 PM
Ground floor, Gallery 2, Emami Art
Facilitated by Anuj Malhotra and Ketan, the forum invites filmmakers and curators to think of and imagine cinematic practice as an ecological act. It employs modes such as the listening circle, film screening, artist presentation, interaction with a mentor, and collective writing and thinking to encourage participants to contemplate the various relationships, networks, systems, and cultures that nourish their practice.
The title borrows from the phenomenon in which neighbouring tree canopies grow in proximity without touching, their individual contours together producing a collective pattern.
Apply by 19th September
The forum invites filmmakers and curators to think of and imagine cinematic practice as an ecological act. It employs modes such as the listening circle, film screening, artist presentation, interaction with a mentor, and collective writing and thinking to encourage participants to contemplate the various relationships, networks, systems, and cultures that nourish their practice.
The title borrows from the phenomenon in which neighbouring tree canopies grow in proximity without touching, their individual contours together producing a collective pattern.
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Kaddukkas is an amorphous gathering of artists, researchers, curators and their loved ones based out of Delhi and Bengaluru in India. The collective organises projects that exist as amalgams of such forms as the moving-image, videogame, the book-object, the fairytale, primitive animation, installation and the workshop. They work primarily with the artistic and cultural histories within the erstwhile colonised south. Kaddukkas then employs speculation and fabulation as modes to animate these situated archives and render them porous, fluid, sensorial and pleasurable. Kaddukkas is organised as a research and curatorial project by Lightcube, an acclaimed film society and publishing house based out of New Delhi. They are currently working on Jugnu Jhund, a pedagogical project that seeks to develop and then install a curriculum around images in different schools across the country.
Anuj Malhotra is a filmmaker, critic and curator based out of New Delhi, India. His artistic practice examinesthe ruptured histories of the community of immigrants he emerges from, the generational trauma that enacts a perpetual siege upon the lives of its constituents, and the various archival modes these individuals then organise to resist erasure, as well as to preserve continuities with ancestral narratives and knowledge.
His films have exhibited at such forums as the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Sheffield DocFest, FCDEP, IDFFSK, Sinema Transtopia, Kochi Biennale, Habitat Film Festival, Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), SET Lewisham and Microscope Gallery, alongwith being featured in the Senses of Cinema World Cinema Poll. A Flower in a Foglight (2022) and Blueprint of a Pleasure Machine (2023), two titles on which he worked as a writer and editor, premiered at the InternationalFilm Festival of Rotterdam (2023), and the former was awarded as the Best Film at Emami Art Experimental Film Festival (2022) and IDFFSK (2023).
Ketan Dua is a sound artist, filmmaker and educator based out of New Delhi, India. He is the Chief Producer, Curator and Programmer for Kaddukkas, a curatorial and research project organised by Lightcube, an acclaimed film society, regularly touted as one of the leading resources for pioneering research and presentation of image-forms in the country. His film, Rafique Raat Ki Baahon Mein (2024) was shortlisted for the prestigious Toto Funds the Arts award for young filmmakers in 2025. His sound design for the exhibition, ‘My House is Ill’ was featured at the Khoj International Artists’ Association in 2023. He is also trained in contemporary and physical theatre, and has issued workshops in subjects as essential as mental health, spirituality, inner wellbeing and collective-making at sites like the India Habitat Centre, The Community Library Project, Maitreya Universal Education School, Nepal Art Council and the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival.
Workshop Model
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The forum will invite the practitioners to present ongoing, unfinished, work-in-progress or speculative projects within the space. For instance, for filmmakers, this may include rough cuts, script drafts, impressionistic moodboards or abstract ideas; similarly, for curators these may feature programme descriptions, concept notes, existing research or draft proposals.
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They will then be invited to discuss their practice with their peers, cultivate a cohort whose inclinations resonate with each other, imagine systems by which they may think or make alongside each other, and start an exchange that will hopefully transcend the duration of the forum itself.
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The forum will seek to foreground a manner of conversation around the moving-image that prioritises the processual, the methodical, the structural and the spiritual.
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It will also be imbued with Kaddukkas and Lightcube’s enduring interest in folkloric infrastructures through which film accumulates and sustains meaning within cultural memory, and will feature conversations around the ecologies of moving image; vital networks through which the form is produced, shown, shared, and preserved.
