Winter school 2014 is organizing a Film Screening on Toilets and the City followed by an Interactive Session with the Director Ms Paromita Vohra.
The event flyer is attached herewith; this gathering is open for CEPT communities.
To know more about film and the director. see link http://www.parodevi.com
Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It peers through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets in Bombay with a small detour in Delhi, 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.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
How did one make a film about toilets which wouldn’t instantly have people giggling? How did one make a film about toilets and gender – indeed why would one – if it was just going to state in some sense the obvious? The obvious being: women don’t have enough public toilets, and this says something about the perception of their presence in public spaces?
The film began with some of these questions, which led me to a slightly simpler one – why did I want to make a film about toilets? Because, I realized, everyone pees, everyone shits and yet everyone is silent about it.
As time went by the effort was to make a film which would go beyond that obvious thing to make some connections and offer a way of thinking about the city and the world we want to remake as we rebuild our cities. To speak not just of the toilets, but of the city via the toilet.
There’s a reason why I felt it necessary to undertake the endeavor. It’s also because despite whatever folks say to the contrary, it’s always an effort for people of other disciplines to see art as a place for suggesting ideas and ways of thinking. People’s idea of film, especially the documentary form, is that it is illustrative, somehow a carrier of ideas generated elsewhere, when in fact the creative endeavor is really a way of seeing and of seeking conversation in the world. To me, the film is a continuation of my engagement with this approach.
Q2P is also part of the Global Cities exhibition at the Tate Modern Gallery, UK. Visit Tategallery
AWARDS AND FESTIVALS
AWARDS: Best documentary, IFFLA, Los Angeles, 2007; Best Documentary, Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart, 2007
MUSEUM/EXHIBITION SCREENINGS: TATE MODERN GLOBAL CITIES EXHIBIT, 2007; LILLE 3000, 2006; BONN BIENNALE, 2006
FESTIVALS: Filmmor Women’s Film Festival, Istanbul (Feb 2008); Royal Anthopology Institute Film Festival, Manchester; Film Festival de Popoli; Ecovisione Film Festival, Florence; SAIFF (NY); Planet in Focus, Toronto; IFFLA; Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart; 3 Screens Film Festival, ISF New Delhi; VIbgyor Film Festival, Thrissur.
Click on the image to enlarge
