Soma Girls
Directed by: Alexia Prichard & Nandini Sikand
Documentary | 2009 | 26min 47sec
India | New York
www.somagirls.org

About the film:
Soma Girls is a documentary short which explores the lives of several girls (ages 6 to 17) that live in a home in Kolkata, India. Soma Girls follows these intelligent, funny and high-energy girls who are trying to overcome extraordinary circumstances so that they can lead ordinary lives.

Screening Times @ Victory Firehouse
5:00pm Friday 6/18
3:15pm Saturday 6/19

About the filmmakers:
Alexia Prichard is an independent filmmaker, videographer and editor, based in Boston. Most recently she was Senior Video Producer/Editor for AOL web properties Propeller.com, Black Voices, AOL Latina, and Green Daily for whom she created and produced an online series on sustainability. In 2008, Alexia covered the Democratic and Republican National Conventions for AOL News and Propeller. Among her numerous editing credits, feature documentary work includes: Call Me Horacio, about the effects of Argentina’s Dirty War on one young man; The Baja Wave Document, about the destructive development along the Baja CA coast; and Discovering: Shuktara, about a home for deaf and disabled boys and girls in Kolkata, India. Alexia is currently in production on The Dirty Truth About Coal, a feature length documentary about the health effects of coal production, and in pre-production on a documentary about a rare breed of cow. She is also partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a film about terrorism called Colossal Failures. Alexia is the founder and executive producer of Closed Loop Films (www.closedloopfilms.com), a production company focused on issues of environmental and social justice.

Born and raised in New Delhi, Nandini Sikand is an independent filmmaker and Odissi dancer based in New York City. Her films include The Bhangra Wrap (1995, distributed by NAATA), Don’t Fence Me In (1998, distributed by Women Make Movies), Amazonia (2001, distributed by Women Make Movies) and In Whose Name? (distributed by Third World Newsreel, 2004). All her films have won awards and have screened at over a hundred domestic and international film festivals. Nandini has been awarded grants for her films from The Jerome Foundation (1997-98) and New York State Council on the Arts (2002 and 2010). She also produced the documentary, Mahasweta Devi: Witness, Advocate, Writer (2001). She served on the board of directors of Women Make Movies, a non-profit feminist, media distribution organization from 1997-2006. She was the selected artist for the Film/Video Arts 2003 Artist Mentor Workshop. She is on the Fulbright IIE National Selection committee for film and video for 2008-09 & 2009-10. In television, she has worked on projects for Channel Four: UK, Rainbow Programming, Ovation: the Arts Network, HBO, Oxygen Media and The History Channel. She is also pursuing a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY and has taught courses on production and film theory at Hunter College, Swarthmore College and Hofstra University. Nandini is also a dancer trained in Odissi and is the co-founder and co-director of the Odissi dance company, Sakshi Productions (www.sakshiproductions.org)