Naina Sen - Filmmaker

Filmmaker and video artist Naina Sen explores cultural identity, gender and equity. AACTA and Walkley nominated, her work privileges First Nations and South East Asian points of view, and includes the wonderful documentary The Song Keepers with The Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir.

In this interview, Naina discusses how focus and discipline support her creative practice.

She offers insight into the emotional and social rigour of testing your ideas, and why accountability must start (but not end) with yourself. Naina asks herself: Why are you telling the story? Why are you working with a particular group of people? Are you the right person to do that?

Through these questions, her commitment to a project is made. 

WE HEART NAINA SEN.

Transcript

Are You Still Working?! Episode 3 - Naina Sen
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Courtney: [00:00:00] Hello, gorgeous listeners. Welcome to Are You Still Working?! How to Take Your Creative Ideas Seriously. I'm Courtney Collins, and this is episode 3, an interview with filmmaker Naina Sen. I first met Naina about 7 years ago when I was living and working in southeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. We recognised each other as kindred spirits immediately. We were at a film conference in Darwin and we went on to make two short films together. Naina is a Walkley and ACTAA nominated filmmaker and video artist.

She was born and grew up in New Delhi. She now lives and works on the lands of the Larrakeyah people in Darwin. Naina works across documentary, installation and projection to explore gender and cultural identity, and equity. Her work privileges First Nations and Southeast Asian points of view. Naina Sen, welcome.

Naina: [00:01:00] Thank you very much, Courtney. It's lovely to be here.

Courtney: So I am on Gumbaynggirr country in the mid North coast of New South Wales. Where are you? 

Naina: I live generally on the lands of the Larrakeyah people in Darwin, but I am currently working on a pretty large scale project, in Naarn on the lands of the Bunurong, Woi Wurrung, and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations in Melbourne. It is very cold here for my Darwin tropical body, but it's a wonderful time of me kind of hunkering down doing some creative thinking so it's it's good

Courtney: Can you tell me about the project? 

Naina: I can. It's a transnational project between India and the Indian diaspora across Australia. Called Shundori. And... It really interrogates and deconstructs and reconstructs the idea of the Indian feminine through an intersection of ritual and mythology and sexuality and gender, personal storytelling and identity. 

Courtney: Yeah, it sounds, it's incredibly rich. 

Naina: Shundori actually [00:02:00] means like Beautious Or Pretty. It's a Bengali word, you know, like someone will say to you 'You look so pretty today' Shundori, like you look so nice today, you look so pretty today, you know, those attributes, those very attributes that often in South Asia outweighed everything else, right?

The Indian feminine is a term I have great issues with. And so I thought that would be a really great starting point, because, you know, for me, the Indian feminist is loaded with so much expectation and gendered history.

So I wanted to take the term Shundori and kind of subvert it to what I think is Shundori, right? Shundori can be many things. It can also be the fact that You are beautiful, there's nothing wrong with feminine beauty. But to me it's also bravery and courage and not conforming so Shundori is kind of my play on that word. It's a very vast project. one that I've been working on on and off since 2018. I started researching and developing the project when I was in India on an Asia linked residency and I wouldn't say [00:03:00] it's a departure from what I do because the foundations of, how this process is working is the same, but it's certainly the first large scale body of work that I've done that references my own cultural upbringing and influence. So it's wonderful and complex.

Courtney: Wow. How can people see that? where can we experience it?

Naina: so at the moment I'm talking to a couple of pretty wonderful festivals in Australia and also a couple of festivals and venues in India. My hope is 2025 that will happen across both places. So stay tuned as they say.

Courtney: every time I see you now that we live so far away, I feel like. Um, you've had another evolution, the world has turned again for Naina in the sense that there's, you've gone around and there's something more. So it's always so delightful, even though too much time passes, but when I do see you, I feel like, she's basically traversed the world again and come back to report.

And it's. You know, [00:04:00] there's always more.

Naina: My god I love that. But I feel the same when I talk to you. It's the same. 

there are always new worlds to explore, right? But I feel like part of the connection you and I have is that we are very deliberate about that. we are invest a lot of thought into that before we do it. Like, you know, for me, for this new particular body of work, it's a thought process of my practice that is evolving, 

when I... I first started my creative practice, 12, 13 years ago, a big part of that was me trying to figure out as a migrant, as someone who is going to live on this land and build this whole new life in this whole new place where I didn't know anybody, what it actually meant to live on this land that is not yours, that is not yours, but is also not the dominant culture's land. Right? There has been invasion and there has been theft and there has been stolen land. You know, the, the version of Australia that I choose to live in is a very conscious one.

And it is one [00:05:00] that very unapologetically centers the oldest living culture in the world. And you know, I've been so privileged With the work I've done in Northeastern Arnhem Land and the work I've done with Western Arrarnta and Pitjantjatjara in the desert But in that process, you know, you think about the idea of Gondwana land. India and Australia was one land mass once.

You'll know people in Northeast Arnhem Land that look South Indian, and vice versa. one of the wonderful things about living in the North, in the Northern Territory, and in Darwin specifically, is the proximity to South Asia. I also think I live in Darwin very consciously

because it is closer to home, there are parts of it that remind me of home, The weather is similar. We have fans. I'm a big fan, a fan of the fan, right? I need moving air. It's what I grew up with. 

In time, I kind of felt like my feet feel solid on this ground. like they have a place. I found a place. It also feels like I have in my own way Contributed to that place in a way that I'm proud of. 

now that I look back at [00:06:00] that body of work your own cultural influences are going to show up one way or the other, right? the way I tell stories, the way I frame things, my attraction to certain colour palettes these are all very connected to who I am. 

Courtney: I think a lovely way to think about integration that I heard recently was this sense of braiding these experiences through your heart and your head. and the way it's, you know, become you and, and you have become it in a sense. 

Naina: That's a beautiful way to think about it. 

I have now lived in India and Australia for the same length of time. It's quite a pivotal point, right, where you are assessing actually what home means, It took me a long time to articulatethe fact that I was lucky enough to have two homes 

and going, that's okay. And actually not just that, that's okay. You are incredibly lucky that those things exist in your body. You know, there is a feeling you have in your body that you only have when you land on Indian soil. That is okay. That does not mean that this is not my home. Australia is [00:07:00] very much my home.

Courtney: One of the many wonderful things you're known for Naina Sen is The Song Keepers, such an extraordinary documentary of extraordinary women and relationships. How did you come to make Song Keepers? It's, it's a big story.

Naina: That project will always, that story, that whole process will always be one of the greatest privileges of my life. Like, I, I, I think everything that has happened since. In some ways, there's an offshoot of that. To me, that set the benchmark for how I would like to work and live and be in the world, in relationship to other people. the way that it happened was incredibly organic. Which is also what I've realized that this is the thing when things happen organically and one thing leads to the next.

It's also how, you know, energetically something is working. Because it was, you're right, it was so [00:08:00] random. You know, I hadn't really lived in the central desert, certainly. I hadn't lived in Alice Springs. All my work was up north and my husband had moved to Alice Springs to work at the university and you know, we'd recently got married I was kind of living between Melbourne, Darwin and Alice Springs because of of the work I was doing up north.

And I was on a flight from Melbourne to Alice Springs. I was sitting next to a lovely woman called Miranda. We didn't know each other and we started chatting and she was like, what do you do? And I was telling her a bit about my work and she was like, oh. You're like, you know, you're really obviously into documentaries about music and culture and ritual and... you know, heavily into music, because at that point a lot of my work had been around Aboriginal contemporary music. And she said, Have you heard about the Aboriginal Women's Choir? Literally, we were on a plane, it was a four hour flight. I looked at her and I said, no. [00:09:00] And I said, Aboriginal women's choir? She said, yeah, it's amazing. And so she started telling me the story of this choir, and this desert song festival, and it's a choir made up of lots of different communities, and I was like, what kind of music do they sing? She said they sing German hymns. I was like, in German? She said, no, no, in language. I was like, what?

and she said, yeah, and you know, the choir conductor Morris Stuart is an extraordinary man because he also ran a community choir that she was sometimes part of. And so that was that. We kind of made Instagram friends or Facebook friends and we got off the flight. But the story stayed with me for days.

I was like, Aboriginal women's choir? Because for me, till then, all the music I'd been exposed to was either deeply contemporary, like deeply, deeply traditional music in ceremony. Or, very traditional songlines, but in very contemporary ways, right? The thought of an aboriginal choir had never occurred to me.[00:10:00] 

Which is strange, because now that you look back at it, it actually makes total sense, given how many communities were part of a mission. In some shape or form. So I looked up this choir, it must have been early 2014. And there wasn't really much about them on the internet.

But, you know, the Desert Song Festival was kind of their festival. It started as somewhere that they would come into town and then perform. And so there was a few concerts online, like phone footage or whatever. Really low fi footage, but even through that, I just had this feeling in the pit of my stomach where I just went, this is extraordinary.

I wanted to know more about the story, right? It started as an exercise of me going, there's a whole part, again, of the history of this country that I don't know. And so Alice Springs is a small town, which is lovely, because it wasn't that hard to find Morris. I found his contact details, and we started talking.

He was, you know, again, he was really open. we didn't know each other. We'd never met and we had a phone call and I said, you know, this is who I am, this is what I do. I'd love to [00:11:00] explore this, he said, it is an extraordinary story. and he said, actually, it might be really good timing because the choir are going to Germany on a tour to take these songs back to source. 

And I was like, what? He said, yes, in a couple of years. He said, so maybe it is a good time. 

And that's how it started. And he said, well, I need to check with the choir. And I think maybe three or four months later, I was sitting in a tiny church in Alice Springs, listening in on my first rehearsal and it took my breath away. And you know, we talk about longevity and we talk about relationships and feelings.

I feel exactly the same every time I hear that choir sing, that feeling is not diminished at all.

Courtney: Beautiful.

Because I've spent some precious time with your lovely mum Indra in Delhi, I know that you swam for India. 

And because I've seen you in the field, with your camera, doing what you [00:12:00] do and you are so focused.

when I saw you at work, I, I identified that focus as one of your superpowers. And when I learned that you'd swum for India, I put the two together somehow, but I, I wanted to hear you talk about that rather than me make these assumptions, do those experiences come  together for you in your filmmaking and your work now?

Naina: Good old Mama giving away all the secrets. They're entirely linked.

They're linked in the way, yes, focus is a thing, of course, when you are an athlete, when you're training. I swam competitively from the age of 12 you know, I used to train six hours a day in the season, and in the off season we would do one session, so it was three hours a day.

The thing that that taught me was discipline and I think as an artist discipline is really important because often we live within structures that are not set up for us. And it [00:13:00] takes discipline to find a structure and then stick to it So discipline, also stamina, literally filmmaking, installation work.

And specifically, I guess, also the way I create work. It's very physical. You know, to me, deep collaboration is as much about breath and body language and intimacy and closeness as it is about all the other non verbal things that happen before and after. So it's also a very physical thing. And often, those shoots are long.

But I think most importantly, the skills that it equipped me with, you know, the discipline and the stamina are then also applied to the rigor with which you hold yourself accountable with your ideas. 

Courtney: I love that. I love that.

Naina: I think there is great validity in, the, emotional and social rigor of testing your ideas, of questioning yourself, right? I [00:14:00] think a lot of that accountability has to first start from yourself.

Why are you doing a project? Why are you telling a story? Why are you working with a set of people? Are you the right person to do that? I think those are very valid questions, and they should be asked. Mm-hmm. 

Courtney: This is a question that, we ask all of our guests who have, years of making experience like you do, how did you learn to take your creative ideas seriously?

Naina: Hmm. I think I'm still learning how to do that. You know, we were talking about discipline and focus before, right? So for me, I work with image making. I work with documentary, those processes are long, from conception to production to post production, they're very long processes. Certainly in my life, they're very long processes. To me, the foundation of everything I do is collaboration. I don't work in a silo. I certainly don't make stories about myself. [00:15:00] Everything from relationship building on a human level, on a professional level, on a personal level, that then flows into those processes, they take time.

And I would say one of my biggest assets, but also possibly one of my biggest downfalls is that I'm not afraid of time. The idea of spending five years, seven years on a project. It doesn't phase me. It's actually my preferred way of working. But I think, it's also a really good measure of if an idea stands up to itself. Like a lot of things can change in five to seven years. You can change your entire outlook on a lot of fundamental things in that time. And so if an idea does not stand that cycle of creativity, you've got it wrong. Because if you cannot believe in your idea till the end, no one else is going to.

And so if you find yourself as time goes on, questioning the idea more, doubting the idea more, not entirely sure if it can hold your own interest. [00:16:00] That to me is a really good test It doesn't mean you have to throw the idea away, it just means it's not ready. 

Sometimes it does mean you have to throw the idea away. For me to take an idea seriously, it has to sit in my body for a long time. I have very visceral reactions to how something makes me feel, how a story makes me feel, 

You know, like I said with Shundori, I mean, I started working on it in 2018. It's something I've been chipping away at very slowly. 

I think more and more I've realized as I get older, if an idea is good enough, if it is sat with you enough, if the people you're working with, if there's a collective consciousness around that idea, where people want to tell that story or create that piece of work, then you do it properly. You wait. 

This idea of working on beautiful things in under resourced ways. I've tried very consciously as I've gotten older to learn how to walk away from that. And so, it's that idea of making sure the [00:17:00] rigor has been there. You've questioned yourself. Not just at the start of something, right? You're constantly doing that. You're gut checking. I gut check a lot. To go, is this still right?

And so I feel like once those things fall into place, then it takes time to raise funding. And that's okay. So it's a massive commitment to take on something big. So you have to know that you also have the commitment and the headspace to see it through, Yeah, so I would say time is the biggest measure in which I figure out if an idea should be taken seriously or not. 

Courtney: Yeah. When you are in the stage or the pit of doubt in a process or a project, what do you reach for or how do you work through that place for yourself?

Naina: My work is about people. It's about intimacy and agency, right? Irrespective of what format it's in. Those things are always central. The process is the same. the first thing I [00:18:00] guess I do is try and figure out where the doubt is coming from. Is it internal or is it external? Because if it's external and there seem to be lots of obstacles or you might be really into an idea and someone else is not.

You have to think about where that doubt is coming from and whether then that means it's a, there's a process change, there's a creative process change, where again, through conversation and kind of deep collaboration, you figure out whether there needs to be a different way to work, does a story need to be different you know, so if it's external, that's, that's very significant to me.

You have to really kind of look at the collective community in which you're making a work. You then really need to again gut check everything. Everyone has to gut check everything if the doubt is coming from internally that again is different because you then have to figure out Do you trust yourself? Or are you operating from a place of fear? 

I guess I have to then kind of figure out whether I have fed this thing. Is [00:19:00] it real or? Because if it's real, again, you have to go through those internal checks again to go. Am I not as committed? are you overwhelmed by what it's going to take to make this piece of work?

And if you are, is it because actually you don't want to do it anymore? You know, do you need to let yourself, not off the hook, but this idea of I'm not capable of it. If that's where the doubt comes from, I feel like I really try and sit with it in the ecosystem of the landscapes in which we live and work in the world. And I also think about how big a role gender is playing in that self doubt. You know, if I don't know how to do something a hundred percent. I'm very clear about that. whereas often men are not like that. They figure it out. Whereas as women, I think we are far more pedantic about what we can't do. Like, I think if we spoke as proudly about what we could do I think that the ecosystem in which that self doubt lived would be very different. And so... To me, I guess some [00:20:00] of the things I do to try and process those things, they're almost extreme.

Sometimes I go, okay, you just need to stop. And I fully lean in. This is new. It's a slippery slope, so I haven't figured it out yet. But I fully lean into the idea of trying to inculcate leisure. I will lean into like, I want to go see something, I want to go do something. I want to lie on the couch and watch Netflix for hours. I'm going to give myself permission.

I have tried to learn to meditate. It is not something that comes easy to me, and it's not actually something that is necessarily right to me. I try and work with breath and those types of things, but I think I do some of my best processing on bike ride. I found a bike ride has momentum. I love bike riding. 

You know, we live on Larrakeyah land that has some of the most beautiful access to landscape and sunsets where you don't have to go very far to be quite overwhelmed and [00:21:00] surrounded by just beauty. I try and go for a bike ride, most sunsets. And again, this is a new thing. I used to compromise for work, for deadlines. As I get older, my body's kind of like, No, no. You want me to help you, you have to help me, you know. You have to get up off your desk So I take that a bit more seriously. 

So often I find that doubt stuff Through those processes sorts itself out.

Courtney: one of the things that I really miss about working in. Ngukurr particularly in Southeast Arnhem Land is that, as you said, you know, we're, we're in another country, we're on someone else's land, we're always on someone else's land, but very conscious that I'm in someone else's culture. And the key, I guess, learning for me in that culture was something I call relationality and nothing happens without it, it's so, um, it happens over time. It happens [00:22:00] turning up again and again happens when you listen, when you learn to listen better. Moving through so many spaces as you do and being a relational person, how do you establish that connection in, I guess sometimes it is a short amount of time? 

Naina: What a good question. I think it becomes a way of being. And so the more you do it, it's like a muscle, which is how then sometimes that can be activated in a shorter period of time, because you've done it over a long period of time. You know, so you know, within yourself, what it feels like to be comfortable somewhere that is not yours. And you pick up markers on what it feels like when someone else is comfortable, when you are on their land, when you are within their culture.

You know, for me, it's really,

it's, it's so basic in some ways. And we forget this. As human beings, we actually have far more in common than not, You go across [00:23:00] region, culture, religion. A lot of us want the same things. You want to be seen, you want to be heard, you want to be respected. You're interested, you're curious. So is the other person. You know, so for me, it's really that, it's just a human element of connecting with someone. And you're not going to have the same type of connection with every person you meet. You're not meant to, but I think to me it's about equity, equity of heart, equity of openness because you can't do that by yourself.

Relationship building for me is a two way street. People talk about trust, right? There's no point if you trust me, but I don't trust you. We both have to do the work, right? And I think, especially in this country, because I'm not from this land in any way. Like, obviously, this is not my land. But I'm also not a white settler.

you know, cross cultural collaboration is one of the most intimate, rewarding things. again, it's built on time, right?[00:24:00] And it's built on the understanding that you are coming from two different places. You are coming from two different cultures. They may or may not have things in common, but the foundations of those things are different.

So there is missing vocabulary that you are then trying to fill with the humanity of understanding which still exists in what I'm doing now, but given that I'm working within my own culture the foundation is the same as mine. It's a really exciting time and it's really interesting where, I have access to nuance. I have access to language. I have access to all the intangible things that live in your body as a cultural being. And so also noticing that feeling and that difference has been quite amazing. You know, like I used to swim, like you said, I used to competitively swim, right? And one of the things we used to do is we would swim with paddles. Right? Resistance training. So you have these paddles. Big paddles strapped to your hands and the point is obviously it's harder to traverse the water.

So you're building up body strength and [00:25:00] So we'd often do this thing where we had to swim about a kilometer in 50 meter bursts with the and then straight after that you take the paddles off and you do the same thing and you would literally feel like you are flying 

Courtney: I can feel that. 

Naina: I actually think in some ways, working within your own culture, because you have nuance, because you have the intricacies, is taking the paddles off. It doesn't mean that it's easier. It just means that you are part of the flow It lives in you, so that's been quite extraordinary. And it's also, I mean, I've always had an understanding of why stories need to come from source, right? even if you're collaborating with someone, if you are talking or exploring a culture that is not yours, there has to be equity in where those points of view are coming from. That has to be your source. That has to be your point of accountability, 

Courtney: I was going to ask you how you stay in love with the work, but hearing you talk about it in that way, it seems [00:26:00] like it's such a multitude of emotions, like, you know, love is certainly part of it, but perhaps not even the most important thing. So maybe a better question is, how do you keep heart for the work when, it asks such immense things of you and the circumstances, are constantly shifting, yeah, how, How do you keep heart for it? How do you keep steady in it? How do you keep going?

Naina: I'd say probably the most honest answer to that is that my practice is built up of, I think, probably a really good and lucky mix. Of work that I initiate you know, work that has been born out of me in a collection of people and work that I then collaborate with other people for their own work. People I have kindred spirits with, people like you, so I feel like there has to be a balance so that everything is not on you all the time. and there's great regeneration with [00:27:00] being a much smaller part of someone else's massive dream and idea. There's a real beauty in that because it's also how you see how other people work.

It's also how you get inspired by other things. You know, if you look at my career, I've been very lucky and privileged to do a lot of very amazing things, But it's a collective work. And so when I made the decision to go, the big things have to be resourced properly and you wait till they're there. It gave me lots of breathing space to think, to have ideas, but then also I mean, it's why again, I'm not scared of time, like I said, but I do big projects sporadically. They take their time. So I'm not in that fight or flight mode the whole time. To me, that is the key. That, that to me is what sustainability is. 

Courtney: I have loved, loved talking with you. I've just learned so much today. I really feel so grateful for the way that you're able to [00:28:00] articulate these really complex, wild processes and just make them feel so graspable and knowable. And like, I want to bring them all towards me. 

Naina: oh, pleasure. I loved it. I loved it. 

Courtney: Keep going. Keep going.

Naina: You too. 

Courtney: Are you still working is an independently prodcued podcast by me, Courtney Collins and produced by Lisa Madden. If you enjoyed listening, you can support us by reviewing it and telling all your friends.

And if you want to stay connected to creative prompts and highlights from our episodes, follow us on Instagram at are you still working. Till next time.