RESISTANCE CINEMA Presents “NERO’S GUESTS” a film by Deepa Bhatia , Mistral Movies, Executive Producer Iikka Vehkalahti, Co-Producers Pramod Mathur, Joonas Berghell, with the support of The Jan Vrijman Fund- Ministry for Foreign Affairs Finland, in association with ARTE France, 2010, 60 minutes
WHEN: Sunday February 6, 2011, 1:15 pm
WHERE: Community Church NYC, Gallery Room 28 East 35th st. @ Park Ave
ADMISSION: Free, donations appreciated
SPECIAL GUEST: ANITA WADED
ANNOUNCING A RESISTANCE CINEMA FIRST!
Our special guest for this screening, Anita Waded, will come to us via a live Skype video interview direct from Bangalore, India.
Nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India over the last 10 years. But the mainstream media hardly
reflects this.
Nero´s Guests is a story about India’s agrarian crisis and the growing inequality seen through the work of the Rural Affairs Editor of Hindu newspaper, Palagummi Sainath or P. Sainath.
Through sustained coverage of the farm crisis, Sainath and his colleagues created the national agenda, compelling a government in denial to take notice and act.
The film is structured around and takes its title from a lecture by Sainath in which he recalls the account by the Roman historian Tacitus of Nero throwing a great party at night while burning prisoners for illumination. It is not Nero that interests him but instead his guests. They were the privileged, the wealthy, the elite nobility, the “best” that the society could produce. Yet they partied to the agony of other human beings.
Through his writings and lectures, Sainath makes us confront the India we don’t want to see, and provokes us to think about who ‘Nero’s Guests’ are in today’s world. While Sainath holds his audience transfixed the film weaves
in and out of the lecture Hall to the dramatic footage following him into the rural countryside of Maharashtra India to visit the families of farmers. There he finds the 
hidden effects of globalization and exposes the suffering that is the result of the corporatization of agriculture for the international market.
P. SAINATH: Rural Affairs Editor of The Hindu, is the 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s most prestigious prize (and often referred to as the ‘Asian Nobel’), for Journalism Literature and Creative Communications Arts. Winner of over 35 global and national awards, his current work on the agrarian crisis has produced the largest journalistic body of work ever on the Indian countryside in terms of the problems faced by farming communities. It is also a body of work that goes far beyond the realm of journalism, capturing issues and complexities that academia and policy makers have failed to.
ANITA WADED has been involved with her brother in organizing farmers at their native village in the south Indian
state of Karnataka to encourage them in adopting organic farming methods and providing them with technical and input support in ancient and contemporary farming techniques. They have also been spreading awareness on the issues of the politics of food and agriculture to both the farmers as well as urban consumers. The basis of all their work has been their small farmland where they have been experimenting with ways to live and grow food in accordance with their political, ecological and spiritual convictions.
We at RESISTANCE CINEMA are immensely proud to say that for three years Anita was an active member of our steering committee while she lived and worked in the fast paced corporate world of New York City. Now, though physically thousands of miles away, she is still with us spiritually and regularly contributes to our work.