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I, Poppy
Resistance Runs through Blood and Soil
Speakers
80 minutes | Mewadi and Hindi with English subtitles | India, France | 2025
Black Gold. Medicine and livelihood. Illegal and industrialised.
Vardibai farms poppies in rural Rajasthan. Her son, Mangilal, organizes protests against the Narcotics Bureau officers who issue licences, fix crop prices, and revoke permissions when farmers resist. She tends her fields. He mobilizes crowds. She pays bribes to survive. He fights the system that demands them.
Shot over four years, I, Poppy watches a Dalit family caught between two impossible choices: comply and survive, or resist and risk everything. When Mangilal wins, Vardibai loses her licence. Then the rains come.
Filmmaker Vivek Chaudhary joins virtually for a conversation with Sunanda Bhat of Vikalp Bengaluru, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
In collaboration with:
Speakers
Vivek Chaudhary
Vivek Chaudhary is an award-winning director, producer and writer whose films have been supported by top film forums and shown at prestigious festivals around the world.
His debut documentary, a mid-length film titled Goonga Pehelwan (The Mute Wrestler), won the Indian National Film Award in the year 2015 and was screened at 2 dozen film festivals all over the globe, picking up many awards. The film was also instrumental in changing sporting policies for deaf sportspersons in India. His debut-feature I, Poppy won the Best International Feature Award at Hot Docs, 2025. The film has garnered positive reviews from National and International Critics and will be traveling to festivals over the next two years.
Vivek has forayed into screenwriting, with his fiction feature getting selected to the prestigious NFDC Screenwriters Lab, 2021 and is currently in pre-production.
Sunanda Bhat
Sunanda Bhat is a Bangalore based documentary filmmaker. Her work is marked by a patient, unhurried approach, allowing stories to gradually unfold: revealing both the resilience of people and the subtle transformations of their environments. Sunanda has been an artist-in-residence at the Pepper House Residency, part of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and is an active member of Vikalp Bengaluru, a collective that curates and screens some of the most compelling non-fiction cinema in the city.
