Screening & discussion with Megha Wadhwa
This event is part of the online Lecture series: Migration, Memory, and the Art of Storytelling on Film hosted by Megha Wadhwa and David H. Slater.
Online event / 22 October 2024 (Tue)
11:00 to 13:00 (CEST)
18:00 to 20:00 (JST)
Please register from here (or from the QR code below):
Finding their niche: Unheard stories of Migrant Women by Megha Wadhwa| Japan and Berlin| 2024| 58 mins| Hindi/English with English Subtitles
This film documents the lives of two Indian women migrants who moved to Japan more than a decade ago, as a case study of the 'trailing spouses' concept in migration.
Jyoti, 41 and Mandeep, 39, grew up in the state of Punjab, northern India, in middle-class households. They received a good education and had promising careers in India. Then, in their early 20s, they each agreed to marry men living in Japan by arrangement.
The women were excited to move to a foreign country and to be with their husbands but they had no prior knowledge of Japan. Through personal narratives told by the women, we examine past, present and future expectations and see how these affect their roles as Indian women, wives, mothers and workers in a foreign country, as well as the challenges they faced in ‘Finding their Niche’.
Megha Wadhwa is an anthropologist, filmmaker, and writer based at the Free University of Berlin’s Japanese Studies department. She is an adjunct assistant professor at Temple University Japan. She is also a visiting scholar at Sophia University Tokyo. She is the author of Indian migrants in Tokyo: A study of socio-cultural, religious and working worlds (Routledge:2021). Her current research looks into migration trends of Indians in Japan, Singapore and Germany.
This project is a part of BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany) funded project – Qualification and Skill in the Migration Process of Foreign Workers in Asia and supported by Free University of Berlin, Goethe University Frankfurt and the ICC Collaborative Research Unit “Visual Studies and Displacement in/to Japan”, a Joint Research Unit between Institute of Comparative Culture of Sophia University Japan and Free University of Berlin.
