A Serious Wedding / जे सी बी रवनवा

Rajat Nayyar

2023 / 20 minutes
Canada / India
English, Hindi with English Subtitles

A Serious Wedding (JCB Ravanva) is a Bhojpuri ethnofiction film that tells the radical love story of a young man and a tree. Can the community’s songs help him save his love from being cut down? For over a decade, I have researched the role of songs and other vocal traditions in navigating relationships between humans and more-than-humans in the villages of Bihar. A Serious Wedding is the result of my long-term collaboration with Bihar-based traditional singer Aaji and members of her village community. The film is an unconventional eco-activist ethnofiction that features the marriage of a young man and a tree—a union that successfully thwarts the state government’s plans to construct a highway that would otherwise destroy numerous trees in the area. Some community members played themselves, while others who work in factories, construction, and carpentry took short leaves from their jobs to portray a romantic activist, a lawyer, and a District Magistrate. Through songs, rituals, and fiction filmmaking, the participants reimagine future scenarios and stage their everyday environmental activism.