BackPreview | Sheharnama
City flicks about flickering cities
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A few days before the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) kicks off on 3 February in the south of the city, an eclectic and exciting set of documentaries and fictional shorts will be screened at the other end. From 30 January-1 February, 40 films will be shown as part of a package titled Sheharnama at the All India Institute of Local Self Governance in Juhu in north Mumbai.
Curated by film-makers Avijit Mukul Kishore and Surabhi Sharma, Sheharnama contains films about the city as an abstract concept as well as a concrete reality. The programme includes films from India and the rest of the world, presentations and talks, and has been organized as a hors d’oeuvre to the main spread at MIFF.
The roots of the festival, say its curators, lie in a request from the Delhi-based non-governmental organization ActionAid, which approached the Films Division (FD) to put together a festival on Indian cities. The FD in turn roped in Kishore and Sharma, who are part of a team of film-makers who organize weekly screenings at its headquarters in Mumbai. “ActionAid wanted to do a Bombay film festival, but we thought it had been done before," Kishore says. Rather, the curators set out to pick mostly documentaries, short fictional films and animated films that would reflect not just Mumbai but several other cities. The mix includes dissections of social issues, personal responses to the urban experience, and ethnographic experiences.
“The majority of films are talking about small and individual voices and experiences and then relating these to the reality of the city and the economy," Kishore says. The student films include entries from young minds at the National Institute of Design, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences—the latter institution contributes Breakin’ Mumbai, a riveting look at Mumbai’s B-boying culture, which is begging to be expanded into a full-length documentary. Delhi features on the list in Uma Tanuku’s Night Hawks, about street life, and Sameera Jain’s Portraits of Belonging: Bhai Miyan, about a traditional kite-maker in the city’s old quarter. Urban housing issues crop up in FD film-maker S.N.S. Sastry’s The Burning Sun, about public housing in Mumbai, and A Disappearance Foretold, in which Oliver Meys and Zhang Yaxuan examine the redevelopment project for a traditional corner of Beijing. The relationship between the middle class and domestic helpers is parsed in Nishtha Jain’s At My Doorstep and Kislay’s marvellous fictional short, Hamare Ghar.
“We were looking at quieter notions of the day-to-day and the mundane, trying not just to probe the notion of the city, but also layer those notions," Sharma says. In Tondo, Beloved: To What Are the Poor Born, Filipino film-maker Jewel Maranan places a camera inside a cramped home in a slum at the Manila port. She records with tremendous empathy a family’s everyday fight for survival, focusing on the daily meals that the family cobbles together, ending the film with a remarkable sequence of a home birth.
There are classic narratives and classics. Filip De Boeck’s Cemetery State is a fascinating ethnographic film that uses an overgrown cemetery in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a metaphor for the overall state of disarray and dissatisfaction felt by especially younger members of the community. Rahul Roy’s Majma explores a running theme in his works, of working-class male sexuality in Delhi. Sheharnama will also host the first-ever screening of the restored version of Deepa Dhanraj’s superb 1986 documentary Kya Hua Is Shehar Ko? The anatomy of one of several communal riots that ripped apart the fabric of the old quarter of Hyderabad, Kya Hua Is Shehar Ko? is the only film in the package that will also be shown at the forthcoming MIFF. “There are all kinds of ways to imagine the city, of exploring different visuals and cinematic languages," points out Kishore.
Feature films have increasingly begun to trample on ground previously covered—and often more fruitfully—by the non-fiction genre, but “the level of ideas that the documentary throws up is usually a denser bundle to unpack," Kishore points out. Although Sheharnama’s programme includes queer-themed films, animation and fictional shorts, its highlight is its showcasing of continuing experiments within the documentary form.
Sheharnama will run from 30 January-1 February at the Mayor’s Hall, All India Institute of Local Self Governance, Juhu Galli, Andheri (West), and is free and open to all. For the schedule, visit www.sheharnama.wordpress.com
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