Marupakkam Online Film Screening # 29 : Our Metropolis

Marupakkam Online Film Screening # 29
From 8th Jan, Friday, 6 pm!

Film : Our Metropolis
A film by Gautam Sonti and Usha Rao
India, 2014 October, 87 min
Language: English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi (Dakkani) with English sub-titles

Synopsis : The promise of a global city is being used to bulldoze Bangalore, India's I.T. capital, at the expense of the people who live in it. To whose advantage?

Bangalore is being refashioned as a 'world-class' metropolis. Livelihoods and homes make way for flyovers, glitzy malls and a shiny Metro. Threatened with violent transformation of their city, residents confront the authorities. Beneath the State's ideal of a 'global city' lurks the intent to clear a pasture for big business.

Director's Statement :
The global city erases everything in its path. As we move from metro to mall, there is nothing to remind us of those who lived and worked where we now stand. This film is our attempt to let these stories live on.

Festivals
Busan International Film Festival, Oct 2014
Dubai International Film Festival, Dec 2014
Tromso International Film Festival, Jan 2015
Cinema Verite, International Documentary Film Festival, Teheran, Iran 2015
Mumbai International Film Festival, India 2016
World Film Festival, Tartu Estonia 2016
NAFA, Bergen 2016

OUR METROPOLIS continues to be screened at several educational institutions and at workshops for urban activists, city planners and architects.

Honours
Supported by Asian Network of Documentary (Busan, South Korea), 2013
Selected for DocWok (Magic Lantern Movies and DOK Leipzig), 2012-13

Main Credits
Direction / Camera
Gautam Sonti
Direction / Location Sound
Usha Rao
Editing, Visual Effects, Sound Design
Abhro Banerjee
Original Music
Anant Menon and Snehal Pinto
Produced by
Gautam Sonti and Usha Rao

Brief Bios

GAUTAM SONTI

I've done my share of commissioned films - and survived. Since 2016, I have been simultaneously making three independent, feature-length documentary films. It's crazy, don't try it! Perhaps the only thing that links all my films is me. But if one is looking for a thread, one could say that some of my films (Coding Culture (2006), Our Metropolis (2014) and TechnoCats (under production) are broadly about technology and society. Which is not surprising: half a lifetime ago, I found myself enrolled as a student at IIT Delhi.

                       

USHA RAO
My career has crisscrossed many paths and jumped several professions from HR trainer, teacher, consultant anthropologist to independent researcher. Over the past two decades I have been trying to make sense of what makes a city and what development’ does to the way we live our lives in them. Our Metropolis (2014) is my first foray into documentary film. Sound and image are central to the work that I do.

INTERACTION WITH THE FILMMAKERS on Sunday @ 11 am via Zoom; Message to 9940642044 for ID and password to attend the program.

 

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE INTERACTION