Nishtha Jain Biography

After studying at the Film and Television Institute of India, the Delhi-born Jain launched her career in 2004 with City of Photos, a multi-layered look at neighbourhood photo studios across Kolkata and Ahmedabad. Her eleventh and most recent film, Farming the Revolution (2024) – winner of the Best International Documentary Prize at Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival – tackles a much larger subject: the recent, 12-million strong protest against unjust farm laws in India. Even working on this immense canvas, Jain brings her trademark sensitivity and keen eye for evocative detail.  

This program brings Farming the Revolution together with Gulabi Gang (2012) about a vigilante feminist collective, and The Golden Thread (2023), set in the last remaining jute mills of Bengal. In each of these films, Jain’s camera does vital work – creating an archive of a political movement, or gathering evidence of murder, or singing a eulogy to worlds slipping by – even as its presence is gently problematised: her subjects often look over their shoulders, directly at it, watching us watch them. 
 
A Member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, Jain has been supported in her visionary work has been supported by the likes of the IDFA Bertha Fund, the Sundance Documentary Fund, and the Alter Cine Foundation, among others.