I am Somnath Waghmare, a documentary filmmaker and film researcher born to a rural Dalit-Buddhist family in Malewadi, Western Maharashtra, India. My mother worked as an agricultural labourer and my father was an ex-mill worker in Bombay, though both have retired because of old age. In 1990 when the mill was shut down in Bombay my parents shifted to my mother’s village.
With limited resources and social capital I have made few documentary films ‘I am Not a Witch’ (2015) and ‘The Battle of Bhima Koregaon: An Unending Journey’ (2017), Memories of Mangaon (2022) , There is no caste discrimination in ITTs?.
The first film is about witch-hunting in an Adivasi community in Nandurbar, Maharashtra. The second is a timely documentation of the annual Dalit –Bahujan gathering of Bhima Koregaon near Pune city and history’s politics in contemporary India. Both documentaries have been screened in different cities of India and abroad and have gained wide critical acclaim.