PLEASE DO COME TO THE FIRST PUBLIC SCREENING of
Q2P
LOOK AT THE TOILET
SEE THE CITY
(55 min, DV, English, Hindi)
Director: PAROMITA VOHRA Producer: PUKAR Camera: AJAY NORONHA Editing: JABEEN MERCHANT Sound: ANITA KUSHWAHA, SAMINA MISHRA Animation: SHILPA RANADE Music: TARUN SHAHANI, NIRAV GANDHI
WHEN: August 18, Friday, 6.30 pm
WHERE: NCPA, Little Theatre
ABOUT THE FILM
Q2P PEERS THROUGH THE DREAM OF A FUTURISTIC MUMBAI AND FINDS….PUBLIC TOILETS…..NOT ENOUGH OF THEM……
Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It sifts through the dream of Mumbai as a
future Shanghai and searches for public toilets, watching who has to queue to pee. As the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, we begin to also see the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; we learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense how similar it is to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers and some of those answers are questions – about gender, about class, about caste and most of all about space, urban development and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer. Her films as director include Where’s Sandra, Work In Progress, Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City, Unlimited Girls, A Short Film About Time, A Woman’s Place and Annapurna: Goddess of Food.Her films as writer include the feature Khamosh Pani, and the documentaries A Few Things I Know About Her and If You Pause: In A Museum of Craft and Skin Deep. She teaches scriptwriting as visiting faculty at the Sophia Polytechnic and is a PUKAR associate.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Monday, August 07, 2006
ttuunnellss
...train to cape comorin...my longest train journey ever! a scheduled 42hr ride, so help me god, ipod, scrabble, kiterunner, dominoes...n some neat arrak! (no not desi daaru, but some anniseed liquere).
as a kid, on the monthly visits to lonavala to see jim n anil, we'd take the train...and i'd wait impatiently for karjat - for those yumm vadas and watch another two diesel engines being attached to the back of the train to help her up the ghats...my fav-est section...tunnels...in n out and in n 
out. i'd scream over the reverberant screeching of the train as it laboured up...almost as if the tunnel would've eaten me up if i didn't hear myself!
...so many lifetimes later, i settle down to that familiar spot at t
he door, ibrahim ferrer filling my ears as i recklessly shoot pics on my 2bit digicam...only to delete most of them. is this what wender's mourned the loss of? the sacredness of an image!
tunnels reccur...in life as well...at times it is so dark and all you can hear is the pounding of your heart...other times, there's that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, just that it doesn't seem to come closer..its there...making me impatient...
tunnels, i've decided will be the leit motif in my film about my dad. my goa film ended with a tunnel. some people liked that...42 hours with 3other people and 4windows! johari windows...how much you n i know about me...
burrowing tunnels in these wndows...more like wormholes that will open up my painful past or accelerate me to a future i cannot fathom. it's been just 2hrs40min since we left dadar stn!!
"rainy days n mondays always get me down"
heard of the carpenters? one rondhdoo whiny band...they sang that song!
seems like i've lost the momentum, the inclination to write...but then there was so much i had wanted to write...so much has happened...feels kinda lost, not knowing where to begin...
as i write, its pissing down so hard i can barely see beyond my window. boy! ain't i glad i'm home n not navigating this fucked-beyond-repair city. was to do a lil shoot this evening and there's no way we can... wish it would rain so hard that these bete-noirs of mine would disappear...there's a high court stay on them for violating environment norms n blocking me view ;)
some of my students and operative cameramen friends have discovered my blog!! how scary!! speaking of which, i shed my usual begining-of-year inhibitions and went back to sophiya's with renewed enthu, back to 40 twenty-nothings, back to stir up my early morns...and how contento i was! a nice mixed bag they are, a fair amount with a couple of years work or post grad...a lot more responsive than i had expected...came out smiling!
o and last night, finally watched omkara...this angrez ka aulaad missed all those throaty guttaral expletives (while the fullhouse guffawed)...will have to wait for that english subtitled dvd!! the film paled for me in comparasion with maqbool...a far tighter script and better performances that was. but yes, happy to see a house full for a not-so-bollywood film. am tired of ajay devgun's sameness...and thought that kareena just didn't fit and bips baby was just atrocious! most suprised n very pleasantly so, to see konkana perform so well. saif, so much has been said about his role n look. such a daring dude!...but net-net, the film "didn't get under one's skin" as c! said, as we escalated down...
on the other hand, almodovar's all about my mother was just brilliant! he must be 99% woman!...rivetting script and such controlled understated performances, fab music and fantastic camerawork (which would completely unexpectedly move to a subjective pov)...men are close to neutered out in this world of women...the more i think about it, the more i'm drawn to feature film cinematography...someday...somehow...
meanwhile, i keep turning down television work much to my boys' discontent . not that my plate's full. not at all...just can't bear the thought of another song-dance show...will wait for koffee to come back later this year. or do a show for discovery only because i haven't worked for them ever!! not too much travel, mostly in studio anchor-link kinda boring shoot. sighhhhh...
and in a record of sorts, the last docu i shot for is ready already! the director, even before discussing the shoot, dates n budget with the crew, knew she'd shoot 10hrs to make a 15min film!!!...and guess what?? we did just that! its turned out like it was meant to be - glossy corporate-y half-truths with some awful music...but my handheld sucks :( but if jabeen didn't shout at me, i guess the footage was largely ok!!
but it's over n out with loud aggro insecure bong women...
seems like i've lost the momentum, the inclination to write...but then there was so much i had wanted to write...so much has happened...feels kinda lost, not knowing where to begin...
as i write, its pissing down so hard i can barely see beyond my window. boy! ain't i glad i'm home n not navigating this fucked-beyond-repair city. was to do a lil shoot this evening and there's no way we can... wish it would rain so hard that these bete-noirs of mine would disappear...there's a high court stay on them for violating environment norms n blocking me view ;)some of my students and operative cameramen friends have discovered my blog!! how scary!! speaking of which, i shed my usual begining-of-year inhibitions and went back to sophiya's with renewed enthu, back to 40 twenty-nothings, back to stir up my early morns...and how contento i was! a nice mixed bag they are, a fair amount with a couple of years work or post grad...a lot more responsive than i had expected...came out smiling!
o and last night, finally watched omkara...this angrez ka aulaad missed all those throaty guttaral expletives (while the fullhouse guffawed)...will have to wait for that english subtitled dvd!! the film paled for me in comparasion with maqbool...a far tighter script and better performances that was. but yes, happy to see a house full for a not-so-bollywood film. am tired of ajay devgun's sameness...and thought that kareena just didn't fit and bips baby was just atrocious! most suprised n very pleasantly so, to see konkana perform so well. saif, so much has been said about his role n look. such a daring dude!...but net-net, the film "didn't get under one's skin" as c! said, as we escalated down...
on the other hand, almodovar's all about my mother was just brilliant! he must be 99% woman!...rivetting script and such controlled understated performances, fab music and fantastic camerawork (which would completely unexpectedly move to a subjective pov)...men are close to neutered out in this world of women...the more i think about it, the more i'm drawn to feature film cinematography...someday...somehow...
meanwhile, i keep turning down television work much to my boys' discontent . not that my plate's full. not at all...just can't bear the thought of another song-dance show...will wait for koffee to come back later this year. or do a show for discovery only because i haven't worked for them ever!! not too much travel, mostly in studio anchor-link kinda boring shoot. sighhhhh...
and in a record of sorts, the last docu i shot for is ready already! the director, even before discussing the shoot, dates n budget with the crew, knew she'd shoot 10hrs to make a 15min film!!!...and guess what?? we did just that! its turned out like it was meant to be - glossy corporate-y half-truths with some awful music...but my handheld sucks :( but if jabeen didn't shout at me, i guess the footage was largely ok!!
but it's over n out with loud aggro insecure bong women...
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