| Resumo: | This chapter focuses on two Indie crowdfunded narratives of gestational commercial surrogacy, “I Am Afia”, the first story in the four-part anthology film I Am (2010) by Indian filmmaker Onir (also known as Anirban Dhar), and Sita (2012), written and directed by US-based filmmaker Arpita Kumar. The protagonist of Onir’s “I Am Afia” (a web designer played by the Indian actress and director Nandita Das) is a single woman seeking IVF treatment in 2009 Kolkata; Sita is a short, twenty-minute narrative film whose protagonist rents her womb out to a Canadian woman, Kate. In different ways, these cinematic narratives offer a critique of the contested bodies of neoliberalism, speaking to the issue of surrogacy in India, a heated topic of debate in social, legal, and academic circles. Beyond categories of local and diasporic, and in line with the premise that the films of the new independent Indian cinema are glocal – global in aesthetic and local in content – these films seek to explore new subjectivities and the attached social practices. In the context of globally gendered and classed interactions and the translocal reconfiguration of family and kin structures, the new independent Indian cinema acts as a catalyst for the emergence of social change, uncovering and disrupting “traditional” social contracts. This chapter presents Onir’s and Kumar’s filmmaking as a situated artistic exercise, part of growing place-based practices which aim to be socially responsible. These arguments are sustained by an interview conducted with Onir, generous excerpts of which are given throughout the chapter.
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