On viewing Cinema
Anna Sound Please
Across the sprawl of the city of Bombay run illegal / unofficial shacks of cinema that double up for shelters and entertainment houses for migrant wage workers. The video theatres, always situated off the centres – under the flyover, behind the bus stop, next to the station; manage to remain invisible to the eyes of the gentry.
Director: Madhavi Tangella
Certified Universal
An impressionistic sketch of ‘the public’ as created by many cinemas and its relationship with the public culture of cinema.
Director: Avijit Mukul Kishore
Do Rafique
Rafeeq meets Rafique Bagdadi, an extraordinary living archive of the city and its cinema, and explores the cinema city through him.
Director: Rafiq Ellias
On the fringe of cinema
Have You Dreamt Cinema?
Three women who live in the neighbourhood reflect on their formed and unformed relationships with the fantasy of a film on a large screen in a darkened theatre. Was it ever theirs?
Director: Hansa Thapliyal
Dhananjay Kulkarni “Chandragupt”
A film writer impersonates as a night watchman in the city of cinema. It is a quintessential yet heart wrenching story of a migrant aspirant.
Director: Rrivu Laha
The city wears its cinema
Sin City
On the filmography of crime in the city. It reverberates with Bombay cinema’s sounds of crime, its grandiloquent echo effects, percussion and music.
Director: Shrikant Agawane
Dark Room
On the basic materiality of cinema – the chemicals and the moving people. The film returns the image to its sources- so the water coming into the beach becomes the water in the trough of the image developing laboratory.
Director: Renu Savant
Director, Painter Shri Baburao Laadsaheb
On the sprawling settlement of Dharavi where, it says, that every conceivable good – both original and fake - is manufactured in the obscure sweatshops, dream of cinema is a producible commodity too.
Director: Richa Hushing
Pila House
Pila House was marked as the entertainment district by the British Government in 1857. Along with the bazaars, the ports, the red light area and the Congress House performers the Pila house theatres were the symbol of urban entertainment at the beginning of the 20th century as they transformed from variety entertainments to Parsi theatre to silent cinema to talkies.
Director: Abeer Gupta
I Shall be Recycled Again and Again
(Swambhavami Yuge Yuge) The tallest matinee idol in the city of manufacturing and construction industries. Along with the mother of Indian men.
Director: Madhusree Dutta