Story Beings is a story-vessel in a sea of stories, bringing forth stories by young girls, women, and people of marginalised genders and identities, shaping conversations on gender and sexuality and sharing their lived experiences.
Through their voice and creativity, they are politicising the personal, sharing their truths about who they are, and what they feel about the world.
The stories that we have documented on this website provide an antidote against gender norms, sexuality morals, power politics, fear, hate, silencing, and amnesia. They are complex and real stories of people that have been historically silenced, whose experiences are not seen, voices are not heard in mainstream media.
By serving as an archive, we hope that as these Story Beings are seen and heard, they will become stronger, give strength to others and challenge oppressive narratives too. That they will help us to ask questions, relate, find differences, inspire new stories, and build a deeper understanding of human experiences.
Point of View was founded as a non-profit in Mumbai in 1996.
Right from the beginning, we have had a wide view of gender, seeing gender as an arc or a spectrum, and seeing sexuality as fundamentally interlinked with gender. We have seen gender and sexual expression as core to free expression and understood this terrain as a political one. Since our inception, we have used words, images, art, culture, and media to change headspace around gender.
In essence, we recognise the power of storytelling as a tool for women, adolescents, and gender and sexual minorities to enter, build and shape conversations on these taboo topics.
We began this program in 2013, and base our work on the Center for Digital Storytelling’s methodology of workshop-based, non-professional, first-person video-narrative production, that foregrounds the voice and experiences of storytellers.
Our hands-on workshops are a practice in building capacity, self-representation, reclaiming power, and breaking down taboos. Workshops are facilitated by filmmakers and adapted to the context and realities of the participants. The stories produced are similarly diverse, in theme and format, not meant to be smooth and manicured as mainstream media outputs, but personal, raw, and powerful.
At the heart of digital storytelling is the unmediated control that women, teenagers, queer and trans people have over their narratives and the way they represent themselves. They also learn to take control of the digital tools needed to produce their stories. In doing so, we are reclaiming technology as a platform for creativity and expression, and as a platform to amplify marginalized folks’ stories, thoughts, and visions for a fairer world.
Between 2015 and 2021, Point of View conducted several workshops with adolescent girls, young women, trans individuals, queer youth, and sex workers from West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka with the aim of equipping them with digital storytelling tools.
We partnered with grassroots organisations from across the country to do these workshops with diverse constituencies in regional languages both in-person and then online, during the covid-19 pandemic.
Some of our partners are:
The workshops generated discussion on a range of issues that are often stigmatised in communities and the public domain; they also resulted in the creation of a large number of digital stories as participants experimented with newly-acquired tools to talk about their own lives and experiences. These stories are an important step towards reclaiming the voice of women and marginalised genders, who have long been represented by others, and building a gender-equal world, online and offline.
Website developed by Sputznik
Website visuals by Vaishali Soni
Video editing by Simran Chandnani
Translators
Hindi: Sahba Syed
Bengali: Anamitra Mukherjee
Marathi: Adwaita Deshmukh
Telugu: Sri Vamsi Matta
Kannada: Bhanu Prakash