YouthArts Mentorship
The collaboration between Recanteur and Community Design Agency (CDA) is aimed at training local Kathakars (community storytellers) to document and amplify the authentic voices of residents of Govandi (Mumbai). Through this initiative, the teams aspire to foster deeper community engagement and contribute to the festival’s vision of creating climate-resilient, equitable, healthy, and vibrant communities.
Mentors
Pritha Chakraborty
Pritha Chakraborty is an independent filmmaker and a creative producer based out of India. Before her debut as a director in 2015, she worked on several award-winning documentary films as an editor.
Since then, she easily transitions between being a director, editor, and producer. Raised in small-town India, Pritha has a unique perspective on the politics of gender, geography, and class, which is often reflected in her works. Her tryst with documentaries further shapes her power of observation. Drawing on such experiences and her formal training as an editor, Pritha enjoys working with simpler narrative forms with nuanced and layered complexities that make up our everyday lives.
For her first venture as a director of a feature-length fiction film, she banked on her ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. The result was a critical yet poignant tale of two women, at loggerheads due to patriarchy, who find salvation in each other. The film—Mukharjee Dar Bou—was also a commercial success.
Being comfortable in both documentary and fiction, Pritha aspires to seamlessly converge the two genres in her future projects. When she is not daydreaming, Pritha can be found directing successful TVCs as the only woman present on the set.
Anisha Sharma
Anisha is an emerging documentary filmmaker with a background in storytelling, production, and community engagement. She trained under renowned filmmaker and mentor Pankaj Rishi Kumar, whose guidance deeply shaped her creative path.
Over the past six years, Anisha has managed productions with Out of the Box Theatre Productions, worked as an Assistant Director in various production houses including The Viral Fever(TVF), and managed communities across diverse spaces in India.
Currently, she serves as an Assistant Mentor at Recanteur, where she helps young storytellers in Govandi explore filmmaking as a tool for expression and change. More than just a typical workshop, our workshops have emerged into a shared safe space , one where mentees and mentors engage deeply with the issues that matter to them and learn to tell their stories with authenticity and power.
Aritra Basu Roy
Aritra Basu Roy is a driven visual storyteller, researcher, and community trainer with a strong academic foundation in Journalism and Mass Communication from Amity University. Her journey spans across writing, anchoring, content strategy, photography, videography, and community-based media, making her a multifaceted communicator with a deep understanding of grassroots storytelling. From her work at The Echo of India and Radio Mirchi to her contributions as a content writer and production associate, Aritra has always gravitated toward stories that speak truth to power.
At Recanteur, Aritra plays a pivotal role as Assistant Mentor, where she trains and mentors young community storytellers—our Kathakars—to use mobile filmmaking as a tool for empowerment and change. Her expertise lies in translating complex social issues into visual narratives that are both compelling and culturally grounded. She’s currently leading content ideation, training, and post-production in projects, primarily based in the Sundarbans, and now in Govandi, including climate change, gender, and food justice. Aritra’s work doesn’t just teach—it inspires. With an unwavering commitment to ethical storytelling, she is helping shape the next generation of changemakers, one story at a time.