Co-Produced/Directed and Edited by Deb Ellis and Prajna Paramita Parasher, 1989, 32 min.
This experimental documentary looks at the life of Manjula Joshi, an Indian woman from the Punjab who works 12 hours a day making poori bread in a Chicago restaurant. Employing competing words, images, and text, addresses women’s roles in traditional culture, the value of women’s labor, the exploitation of immigrant women, and the experience of immigration.
First Place, Experimental Documentary Category. Athens International Film Festival, 1990. Women in the Director’s Chair/All the Angles, 1990. In Her Own Image: Films and Videos Empowering Women for the Future, a guide produced by Media Network. Distributed by Women Make Movies, NYC until 2005
“Structured between a biography and testimonial, between reportage and evocation, adopting an array of representational strategies similar to those of History and Memory such as reenactments, interviews, intertitles, quotations, superimposed images, and evocative musical passages, Unbidden Voices examines the life of a Third World woman living in the First World. (Manjula Joshi is an Indian woman living in Chicago, eking out a modest living.) The video’s final sequence begins with an intertitle. It addresses the issue of speaking for oneself at the very moment when such speech threatens to become the words of ghosts, rendered invisible by a global economy that swallows up differences:
When we discover that there are several cultures instead of just one and consequently at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery.
Unbidden Voices does more than simply define the issue. It also evokes it through the superimposition, in sequences near the beginning and the end of the tape, of a tracking shot in an Indian sector of Chicago with shots taken on the streets of India. In one passage the grainy, black-and-white Indian footage exhibits soft, earth tones, indistinct boundaries, and numerous individuals (including a woman who pulls a veil across her face when she notices the camera). These images are then superimposed over the tracking shot in which the most distinctive feature is the sharp, bright, metallic glint of car after car parked along the street. The two images overlap but clash. No explicit commentary is required to make the point.
From Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, by Bill Nichols. p. 85