'SPENT', 'EARNED' film screenings: economic abuse in India

Join us for a screening and panel discussion exploring two powerful films on women's economic struggles and resilience. 

Based on interviews with over women across diverse backgrounds, these documentaries uncover the realities of economic abuse, unpaid care work, and the fight for financial freedom in India. SPENT: Fighting Economic Abuse in India and EARNED: Negotiating Economic Freedom in India are part of a trilogy: SPENT, EARNED, SAVED.

The film screening will be followed by a panel with Dr Anandi Rao (SOAS), Dr Punita Chowbey (Sheffield Hallam) and Prof Sundari Anitha (University of Sheffield).

SPENT and EARNED are based on accounts from 10 women, following interviews with 50 women and group discussions with an additional 25 women representing diverse class, religious, and caste backgrounds. Further, women represented a diversity of occupational categories, including professional roles, manual work, daily wage work, and homemaking. 

SPENT explores women’s experience of economic abuse and their fight against it. The film aims to bring out these women's resilience and agency in the face of economic abuse. SPENT has been named a semi-finalist at the Women, Life, Freedom Film festival 2024; an official selection at the Kerala Short Film Festival, 2024. EARNED explores the role of the invisible burden of unpaid care work, male control over women’s work life and deeply normalised social norms and systemic challenges in limiting women’s ability to participate in the labour market. 

The film’s protagonists—a government sanitation worker, a private mall security guard, a domestic worker, a self-employed rickshaw driver, an entrepreneur, and a homemaker and artist, although from diverse backgrounds, embody similar strategies to fulfil their aspirations for economic autonomy. The films explore themes of domestic violence - viewer discretion is advised.

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