About Us
Parodevi Pictures began as Devi Pictures in 1995. In the last 20 years, it has created a distinctive style that always hits the pleasure buttons – both in your head and your heart.
Founder Paromita Vohra has been a filmmaker, writer, teacher, actor, art curator and relentless Antakshari winner for 25 years. Her distinctive aesthetic has been admired across the world and her films screened at places like film festivals (Women’s Film Festival in Seoul, IFFLA, Festival dei Popoli, Film South Asia Kathmandu) and art spaces (the Tate Modern, London; the Wellcome Art Gallery, London; Bonn Biennale, Bonn, and the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi). From her very first film, she created forms that are feminist, that embody the feminist eye turned upon the world.
Parodevi Pictures has consistently broken new ground, in content and form. The production house has presented 10 highly successful documentaries, many of which are considered landmarks in Indian documentary practice. Vohra’s 2002 film Unlimited Girls changed the way documentary cinema was made and imagined in India. Unlimited Girls and the films that followed created a uniquely Indian, characteristically intimate form of filmmaking and seeded important ideas of media, gender, feminism, urban life and equality in public (and private) narratives. Our films addressed issues that have since obsessed the country. We were, for instance, the first to research and discuss the issue of women and public toilets (Q2P, 2006) and the first to bring the phrase ‘love jihad’ into the public domain (Morality TV and the Loving Jihad, 2011).
Parodevi Pictures has since made an extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations and television programming going effortlessly from the mainstream to the alternative. It also regularly holds media programs and youth, film and media workshops. It has collaborated on cultural productions at three editions of the World Social Forum. Parodevi Pictures’ multimedia work has won several awards (Best Documentary, IFFLA, Los Angeles, 2007; Best Documentary, Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart, 2007; Women’s News Award, WFFIS, Seoul, 2006; Best Short Documentary at the International Video Festival of Kerala, 2008; Best Documentary, Ladakh International Film Festival) and is now studied in university syllabi around the world (Brandeis University, NYU, Berkley, Yale, Cambridge).