Sheharnama: A City/Film Festival brings together films that turn their gaze into the crevices of our cities.
Our cities are most often represented within the cinema of crisis and confrontation. We have attempted to bring together films that look askance, at the quieter moments, the unseen corners, the unmarked maps.
Anirban Dutta’s Wasted meditates on the spectacle of waste in our cities. The film draws together images and conversations from all over the country to reflect on the philosophy of waste and rebirth. Uma Tanuku’s Night Hawks follows the observational mode to explore Delhi’s life at night.
The grace and delicate detail in Sameera Jain’s Portraits of Belonging- Bhai Mian, about a kite maker in Old Delhi, is all the more valuable today in the times of a brash mediascape. Heddy Honigmann paints a picture of her city, Lima, forgotten by history and international hype, with equal care, through the lives of her protagonists in El Olvido. The NID student film by Megha Lakhani, Prakash Travelling Cinema, begins a conversation on labour in the city with an erstwhile mill worker who makes a livelihood out of junk and worn out film prints. The camera follows the protagonist through the city opening up the frame to look at the transformation of Ahmedabad.
I Sing The Body Electric, another NID student film by Shalinee Ghosh, makes labour visible through a poetic, abstract piece. Hamare Ghar, Kislay’s student film from FTII, uses fiction to take a sharp look at the benign feudalism that we foster in our homes towards the people who work for us. Nishtha Jain’s At My Doorstep pieces together the lives that barely create a shadow but toil away in our neighbourhood. Yashaswini R. and Ekta Mittal’s Presence does not attempt an unveiling of lives but instead overwhelms the hectic transformation of Bangalore with stories of ghosts and desire narrated by the migrant workers building the metro. Amudhan R.P.’s Shit, makes visible the notion of caste in labour in the city.
The performance of masculinity in the city is the narrative that often gets sidelined when contemplating on gender. We chose Rahul Roy’s Majma, Lalit Vachani’s Boy in the Branch and two student films, from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology and TISS, Maachis ka Sinko and Breakin’ Mumbai, to interrogate notions of oppressiveness, but equally to think about subversion. We need to rethink how to confront the marginalisation of women in the public.
The iconic Mumbai film by Mira Nair India Cabaret chronicles the lives of bar dancers. The lens of victimhood does not inform her gaze. We felt that this film is able to nuance and complicate the discussion on the performance of gender.
A Disappearance Foretold, Tondo, Beloved: To What the Poor are Born and Cemetery State take us into communities at the margins of their cities – Beijing, Manila and Kinshasa. Three very different ways of looking but the experience of the films connects with the experiences of churn within our cities.
Identities get mobilised to subvert, to provoke and to assert citizenship. The selection of films presented by the Bangalore Queer Film Festival celebrate being queer and nuance the festival’s narrative of mobilising identities in the city.
City / Citizen is a programme of Films Division films made over a 25-year period. Three of these instruct us on becoming the desirable citizen of our modern cities and one complicates this construct by subverting and critiquing its own agenda. The thread of “the ideal citizen” gets invoked and challenged time and again in the films. Vikas Chalu Chhe, the student film from NID by Prachee Bhajani brings into sharp relief the paradigm of beautifying and developing cities for the “ideal” citizen, alienating the majority.
Deepa Dhanraj’s Kya Hua Shahar Ko? on the 1984 Hindu-Muslim riots in Hyderabad remains as compelling and relevant today. Made at a time when visual media was entirely state controlled, this film set out to document the events exhaustively, sharpening the analysis. In ‘My Mother India’, Safina Uberoi references the 1984 Sikh massacre in Delhi through a personal story of her family. While the events of that terrible time are recoded in our collective consciousness, Safina details the overwhelming impact that these monumental tragedies have on individual lives. The story is not about being ‘affected’ by the riots but about being a part of a landscape that get defined by sharpened identities.
Sheharnama: A City/Film Festival hopes to imagine a broad narrative of the city that allows for nuance and quietude.
Sheharnama 