When a detective is recruited to locate a secret in the bylanes of a lost film-city, little does he know that it is after all a set-up; a conspiracy to send him on a mission with no return. —Matra Publications

India—my nation—is being rebuilt. Her foundation is being laid on the imagined land that claims to be the birthplace of my grandmother’s God. In the mythology that she passed down to me during many summer nights, her God was magical, kind, imaginative and democratic—just like my India was supposed to be. But today, through its many retellings and reimaginings, the tale is being used as a political tool to manifest the violent desire of a Hindutva state. This film attempts to remember—as well as dream—a forgotten nation.
—Nehal Vyas

An essay film that parallels a replicated mining town of Johannesburg in California to the mines in South Africa. It serves as an indicator of how those who profiteered of mining in South Africa, the white population, where able to leave and start a whole new town based on where they came from, whereas those who work the mines, the black population, are still faced with excruciating conditions. This is seen via the archive footage of the Marikana mines massacre of 2012 contrasted over the beautiful voice of Miriam Makeba.
—Advik Beni

Over the last 2 years in Delhi starting late 2019, I wrote, filmed and recorded, as days and nights turned from collective rage and exuberance to withdrawal and solitude. The search was along the edges of disquiet and premonition, in fragments and intensities, through wandering and not-staying. Perhaps down pathways made from adjacent knots of desire, seeking solace, seeking life. This video / essay has been composed from those notes, recordings, slivers of prayers, non-intended sound, stranger-love, lamentations and extreme longing, in a city that absorbs, mirrors, tears apart, and simultaneously allays both remorse and euphoria.

What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations or fantasies that have no canon? **

These incomplete fictions, these false closures and tenuous associations, compose a timeline of the city at an angle through the time of this work. There is a shadowy sense of a protagonist who un-dreams it all; a stranger, who turns out, is no stranger at all.

Somewhere I wrote:
… so much power, it is difficult to move towards love.

—Priya Sen

*Majrooh Sultanpuri translated by Baidar Bakht and Marie-Anne Erki
** Lauren Berlant, from ‘Intimacies: A Special Issue’