Debalina Majumder is an award-winning independent filmmaker, cinematographer, festival curator, media producer, a Global Media Maker Fellow and a Berlinale Talent. Primarily in Bengali, Debalina’s oeuvre comprises films she had shot and directed with limited funding from community and collective funding, on issues ranging from lesbian suicides to female feticide, from personal to local history to chronicling activist memories.
Debalina’s films have been screened at prestigious festivals in India and abroad as well as across classrooms worldwide and in community spaces, with her documentaries embracing alternative sexuality and diverse related subjects. Far from being linear narrations about same-sex lives and the challenging times in which these lives are situated, Debalina’s films are an eclectic mix of styles, genres, techniques, and aesthetics that arrive at important polemical destinations. Diverse iterations of social and political non-normativity and dissent intersect in her work. Often located in and synonymous to the sites she is conversant with, such as the chaotic, complex, contradiction-ridden, charming city of Kolkata, its badly neglected suburbs, or other parts of Bengal, Debalina’s films explore the links between environment, contested notions of the nation, popular and lived memories, histories, struggles of people and places through certain epochal events in Indian history.
In 2021, Debalina was the only queer artists invited to Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast to showcase an assemblage of her work with live accompaniment of the Ulster Chamber Orchestra.
Apart from films directed by her, Debalina has been a cinematographer for various national and international projects including a documentary on sex workers of Kolkata for Current Television, Italy; a documentary, ‘From Border to Border’, on the Chinese community of Kolkata for Hakka television channel, Taiwan; Debalina jointly won the best cinematography award in the ‘Vancouver International Women in Film Festival’, 2021 for ‘Holy Rights’ which traced the myriad journeys of Muslim women, some of whom aspired to master Islamic law.
She remains active with nationally reputed humanitarian organisations like Sappho for Equality, Sahayog and numerous other grassroots movements in her own surrounding and the city. Her films on early marriage, domestic violence, and women empowerment have been nationally and internationally acclaimed and screened at multiple festivals.
Among her recent works, cinematography and creative production for Third Eye’s film ‘Sex (work) and the City’, a film on transwomen of Kolkata, ‘Face to Face’ (2022) and photographic project of survivors of domestic violence funded by Institute of Development Studies Kolkata IDSK and British Academy, UK, and film project documenting the structure and function of the world’s largest open prison, merit mention. The film ‘Sex (work) and the City’ has won the 13th edition of the Laadli Media & Advertising Awards for Gender Sensitivity 2023.
As a still photographer, Debalina enjoys capturing expressive frames with themes ranging from the mundane to the prosaic, and sometimes absolute splendour. Her writings on gender, sexuality, equality, and the environment have appeared in numerous magazines and leading dailies.
In November 2024, Debalina raised funds for and curated the first ever Citizen Nagar Film Festival, bringing attention to the riot-induced displacement and environmental precarity that the residents of Citizen Nagar negotiate with every day.
Debalina has served in the jury of several important film festivals such as the Kolkata International Film Festival and the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. Debalina actively mentors in the LGBTQIA community to teach queer youth to tell their own stories, and regularly conducts photography workshops with underprivileged children.