[Reader-list] "Q2P" Film on Friday

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Dear Friends:

The Students Council and Students of Color Committee of the Department
of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the South Asia Forum at MIT
invite you to a screening of the documentary film from India, "Q2P", on
woman and public toilets in Mumbai, directed by Paromita Vohra. The
screening will be on FRIDAY 27 APRIL at 6.00 P.M. in the Audio-Visual
Theatre in Room 7-431 at DUSP, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
02139. 

The director will introduce the film, and the hour-long screening will
be followed by dinner and open discussion. If you plan to attend, please
RSVP to Anne Schwieger aschwieg at mit.edu and Ronilda Rosario Co at
ronilda at mit.edu. For more information about the film and the director,
please visit http://urban.media.mit.edu/wiki/Q2P_Screening

Regards, 



Shekhar Krishnan

--

About the Film:

"Q2P"
(Documentary, 2005, 53 minutes, DV, English, Hindi)

LOOK AT THE
TOILET ...                                                                 
                   ... SEE THE CITY


Who is dreaming up the global city? Q2P peers through the dream of a
futuristic Mumbai and finds... public toilets... not enough of them.

As this film observes who has to queue to pee, we begin to understand
the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape and the
constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space. We meet
whimsical people with novel ideas of social change, which thrive with
mixed results. We learn of small acts of survival that people in the
city’s bottom half cobble together. In the Museum of Toilets, at a night
concert, in a New Delhi “international toilet”, in a Bombay slum, 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. 

She has written, produced and directed Morality TV and the Loving Jehad:
Ek Manohar Kahani (2007) a documentary on moral policing and tabloid
culture set in Meerut, Q2P(2006), a film about toilets, and the language
of urban development with a focus on Bombay, Where’s Sandra(2005), a
film about sexual and community stereotyping of Christian women, often
referred to as ‘Sandra from Bandra’ in Bombay, Work In Progress (2004)
about the World Social Forum which took place in Bombay in 2004),
Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City (2004), a film that probes the myth of
Bombay’s cosmopolitanism through the politics of land and food, which
won an award at the Indo-British Digital Film Festival,  Unlimited Girls
(2001), an exploration of what feminism means to different people in
urban India which has won several awards, A Woman’s Place (1998), a film
about women's legal strategies in India, South Africa and the USA (for
PBS), Annapurna: Goddess of Food (1995) about an organization of women
food workers in Bombay's textile mill area which has been broadcast in
10 countries and A Short Film About Time (1999) a short fiction about a
woman with a broken heart, her therapist and his watch. 

Her work as a writer includes the feature films Khamosh Pani (Silent
Waters), about a woman whose life is transformed by growing
fundamentalism in a Pakistani village(dir: Sabiha Sumar), for which she
won the Best Screenplay award at the Kara Film Festival, 2003 and
Khamoshi:The Musical (Additional Scriptwriting) (dir: Sanjay Leela
Bhansali); the documentaries Skin Deep, A Few Things I Know About Her
and If You Pause: In a Museum of Craft as well as a series of short
fiction films on communal conflict for the People’s Decade of Human
Rights Education (PDHRE). 

-- 

Shekhar Krishnan
400, West 119th Street, Apt.10D
New York, NY 10027
U.S.A.

http://www.mit.edu/~shekhar
http://www.heptanesia.net
http://www.crit.org.in/members/shekhar