Threads: Sustaining India’s Textile Tradition

Threads: Sustaining India’s Textile Tradition is a documentary film that follows the stories of fashion designers and fabric artisans as they transform traditional textile practices for contemporary fashion markets. After decades of decline in demand for legacy fabrics, these stories demonstrate that committed, collaborative relationships between designers and artisans can innovate traditional practices.

We meet Chanderi Master Weaver Bhagwandas who describes how Sanjay Garg (Raw Mango) refined motifs and color in Chanderi weaving. We explore Rahul Mishra’s collaboration with bandhani Master Craftsman Jabbarbhai to innovate tie-dyeing processes in merino wool. We watch Aneeth Arora (Péro) as she works with artisans and craftspeople to modernize traditional silhouettes. And we discover how Rahul and Shikha Mangal (Vrisa) marry handmade with machine-made processes to sustain artisans and appeal to contemporary consumers.

The film features interviews with designers in Delhi and Jaipur; hand weavers in Chanderi, 350 miles south of New Delhi; bandhani tie-dyers in Bhuj, in India’s north west; and block printers near Jaipur in Rajasthan. The clothes they produce appeal to an increasingly affluent Indian middle class and global diaspora by using textiles that reference traditional techniques in a contemporary way.

Threads argues that sustainability involves more than environmental stewardship and improved economic circumstances for workers: Designers and artisans collaborate in ongoing creative relationships to reinvigorate both traditional textile techniques and the communities who produce them.

In English, Gujarati, Kutchhi, and Hindi.

About the filmmakers

Katherine Sender is a documentary filmmaker and professor in media and sexuality in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, US. She has produced, directed, and edited nine documentaries that range in topic from LGBTQ representations on US television since the 1960s, makeover television shows, and independent artists and dancers. Her films have appeared in film festivals around the world, from the US to Europe, Australia, and South Africa. She loves how her film work and her written scholarship create paths of intersection that invigorate and sustain both practices.

Shuchi Kothari is a critically acclaimed filmmaker (Firaaq, Apron Strings, Coffee & Allah, Rann, Shit One Carries). As a writer and producer her films have screened in more than hundred film festivals including Venice, Cannes, Toronto and Telluride and on online platforms such as Netflix and Amazon. Shuchi’s creative work often focuses on issues of inclusion, exclusion, home, belonging, cultural hegemony and personal resistance. She co-founded the Pan-Asian Screen Collective in 2018 to advocate for increased Pan-Asian representation on and behind the screen in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Subtitled.