“It worked,” Swaroopamma, a farmer and filmmaker from Medak district, said. “They sanctioned the project and let us do it through our traditional system.”

Swaroopamma, in her mid-40s, and her community of filmmakers — a group of 20 young, old and middle-aged women farmers of Medak district — know the power of their medium. On May 19, their films took them to the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity in Bonn, where they released a multimedia publication, Affirming Life and Diversity — a collection of 12 videos they had made on their local markets, their alternative public distribution system and their food systems.

On Monday, they were in Delhi, the fourth stop during the global launch of their project. “This is perhaps the first time that a group of peasant filmmakers have launched themselves on a global stage,” PV Satheesh, director of the Deccan Development Society (DDS), said while translating the rustic Telugu spoken by the women.

The filmmakers are part of the society’s Community Media Trust, which was set up in 2001 to enable the people of Medak to be “active producers rather than consumers of the media”.

“When we started out, our rough hands were fit only to wield the sickle. But now we can handle the camera, have our voices heard in our community and the world outside,” says 35-year-old cameraperson Narasamma Masanagar, whose work has taken her to countries as far as South Africa, Mali, Indonesia and Thailand.

In 2005, the women documented the implications of Bt Cotton use in Andhra through three films ¿ including Why are Warangal farmers angry with Bt Cotton? and Bt Cotton in Andhra Pradesh. A three-year fraud was one of the many factors that led to a temporary ban on Monsanto Bt Cotton in the state.

Since then, the society and its filmmakers have moved on. They are now custodians of the knowledge of their people. Through interviews of elders in the villages they have revived traditional methods of farming and preservation. The result: their villages are completely self-reliant when it comes to farming. They do not need to scramble for seeds when planting season nears; their organic farming frees them of dependence on chemicals. “There is so much knowledge in our villages. As we screen our films in village after village, we are sharing that,” Narasamma said.