Biography
Nina Sugati SR aka Nina Shivdasani Rovshen’s path intersected briefly with Akbar Padamsee’s VIEW in Bombay, but her political conscientisation took place in the USA, where she studied art in Pennsylvania (1966-1970) and film at Cal Arts (1971-1973). In the USA, she marched for peace in the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and osmotically imbibed the anti-authoritarian spirit of the counterculture. While studying at Cal Arts, she was sensitised towards the lives of African American convicts and Native American people forced to live on reservations. These experiences inform her three exceptional experimental films, which have not been shown in the last four decades. Rovshen serendipitously encountered most of her characters on the streets or beaches of Los Angeles. Her cinematic approach has been one of positioning her protagonists in space and time such that their “subconscious reveals the truth”. This comes through in Breaking Ground (1972), where the African American girl Crystal Armst...