Jan 30 2025 to Jan 30 2025 6:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Four years ago, young worker Mahesh had cycled two thousand kilometres alone to return home during the first lockdown. Now he finds himself the subject of a film being made about his epic journey. But as the shoot comes to an end and Mahesh returns to the maze-like site of his construction job, the portrait of an endearing young man trapped in his condition emerges. Blending fact and fiction, this hybrid, film-within-a-film retells migrant workers’ tales while examining cinema’s cold gaze.

But as the film shoot comes to an end, Mahesh grows desperate. Will he lose friends and home all over again? Is his cinema-dream yet another disappointment? At night he takes off on his cycle. Can he escape one more time?

This hybrid, experimental film-within-a-film, marries fiction and nonfiction to explore the alienation of a migrant worker India by drawing the portrait of an endearing young man, trapped in a vicious cycle of disappointments.

The innovative film leans on the works of Indian poets like Namdeo Dhasal and Varavara Rao; filmmakers like Abbas Kiarastomi and authors like Franz Kafka to investigate one of India’s most important and underreported social phenomena – migration.

A conversation with the filmmaker, Suhel Banerjee and Ekta Mittal will follow the screening.

Speakers
Suhel Banerjee
Filmmaker

Suhel is an Indian filmmaker who locates his stories on the intersection of nonfiction and fiction, myth and reality – just like millions of his countrymen and women for whom this interplay is a way of life. His films have been shown in competition at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) where it won the best first feature award, as well as in Indian film festivals including the Kolkata International Film Festival (KIFF) and Indian Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala (IDSFFK). He lives in Goa and is currently working on his debut novel.
Ekta Mittal
Co-founder, Maraa

Ekta co-founded Maraa, a media and arts collective in Bangalore in 2008. She works there as a practitioner, researcher, curator and facilitator around issues of gender, labour & caste in rural and urban contexts. She has been making films around labour, migration and cities since 2009. Her films focus on the inner worlds of workers in the context of migration. She has also co-founded a theatre group called Freeda, in Madhya Pradesh for women to tell their stories on their own terms, based on their lived experience and worldviews.  She is currently working on a film in Chhattisgarh tracing the decay, disappearance and destruction of villages in North Chhattisgarh because of coal mining.