Grandmas’ tale lights up lives worldwide with sunny message
DOCUMENTARY ON SOLAR STANDARD BEARERS SCREENED IN ABU DHABI
Agroup of 80 women, many of them grandmothers with little or no previous technical grounding, helped electrify hundreds of thousands of homes around the globe using solar energy.
This pioneering bunch, known as ‘barefoot solar engineers’, have lit up about 450,000 homes in 49 countries thus far.
An award-winning film — No Problem — Six Months with the Barefoot Grandmamas — documenting the grandmothers’ story of hope and courage was screened at the Indian embassy in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday evening.
The documentary is about a rural solar electrification project run by the Barefoot College in the village of Tilonia in the Indian state of Rajasthan, where numerous illiterate rural women from all over the world, particularly Africa and remote villages of Asia and Latin America, are being trained as solar engineers.
Women from countries such as Tanzania, Bhutan, Uganda, Sudan and Liberia have enrolled for the Barefoot College programme.
The documentary highlights the efforts of such women who have brought about qualitative change for thousands around the world.
Yasmin Kidwai, the filmmaker behind the documentary, who attended the screening, ■ said the women with little or no technical knowhow whatsoever had gone on to become ‘solar engineers’ thanks to their “indomitable determination and on-ground training”.
This story of hope, courage, enduring friendship and belief, has been selected for 15 film festivals across the world. The women learnt by doing and overcame huge odds to succeed, she said.
Six-month transformation
The women — in the 35 to 50 age group — spent six months at the college and were trained to light up homes with solar energy. They returned to their home countries with their newfound skills, visiting people’s homes and fixing solar panels to get them on the grid, said Kidwai, an award-winning Delhi-based documentary filmmaker.
The film has won accolades at several film festivals that include ‘Ousmane Sembene Films For Development Award’, the highest award presented at the Zanzibar International Festival and best documentary award of the Sandalia Sustainability Film Festival in 2018.
Despite the language barriers and limited facilities in Tilonia village of Rajasthan, these grandmothers who barely had any technical skills returned home as solar engineers, full of confidence to light up others’ lives, Kidwai said.
The documentary follows the story of the 2011 batch that graduated from the college in Tilonia that is funded by an Indian government scheme, which was launched in 2010.
Kidwai’s new documentary Filmistan — The Euphoric State of Bollywood is about the secular nature of Bollywood and is ready for worldwide release soon.