Director/Producer: Vishakha Gupta

Description:

The National Register of Citizens or NRC is unique to Assam and is meant to identify those accused of being illegal immigrants. To be included in the list, each of the 32 million applicants had to provide government issued documents to prove that they or their ancestors came to India before Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in March of 1971. But the four-year long process of creating the list was marred with errors and has left members of the same family standing on two sides of the citizenship line. This story is about the wave of anxiety that has gripped the people of Assam whose distress fueled nationwide protests when in late 2019 the Indian government announced its plan to create a citizen’s registry for the whole country.

Biography:

Vishakha Gupta is a U.S. based documentary filmmaker and journalist from India. She has years of experience telling stories that touch upon issues of identity, education, environment and human rights with credits as a producer, director, cinematographer and a reporter. Her directorial debut, The List, looks at the issue of immigration in India’s northeastern state Assam, through the lens of families fighting to prove their citizenship. She is also trained in using Communication for Development (C4D) tools and has worked as a development communicator with changemakers, grassroots organizations, and government led initiatives in her home country. Vishakha earned her master's degree in journalism from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and holds a graduate diploma in communication for development from the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai. She is a proud member of The Video Consortium and Brown Girls Doc Mafia.

Contact Information:

w: https://www.vishakhagupta.com/
e: ​​vishakha.vg.gupta@gmail.com