Mumbai filmmaker wins Michael Moore award

HONG KONG: A documentary film that narrates the spatial experiences of a 10-member family living in a cramped Mumbai slum, made by Sheetal S Agarwal from Mumbai who studied filmmaking from Hong Kong, has won the prestigious Michael Moore Award for Best Documentary Film at the 44th Ann Arbor Film Festival.

The film, Ordinary Lives, is an exploration of the social, cultural, infrastructural and political issues that confront the penurious family in space-starved Mumbai.

The  a 38-minute film has, at the centre of its narration, a 10-member family living in a 180 sq ft shack in a Mumbai slum. 

It focuses closely on the family’s daily struggles. By juxtaposing voices from both within and outside the slums, the film re-examines age-old socio-politico-economic issues such as poverty, human rights and gender equality, and brings out the fact that the poor have vastly different concerns from those of government officials, whose goal is to replace the slums with a shining city that’s modelled on Shanghai.

Agarwal — who graduated in commerce from KC College in Mumbai and completed a diploma in commercial art from Nirmala Niketan Arts College in Mumbai — is an MFA graduate from the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong (CUHK). 

The Michael Moore Award is named after the Academy Award-winning filmmaker and best-selling author, whose Fahrenheit 9/11, an expose of President George Bush’s flawed war against terror, is the highest grossing documentary film of all time.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is one of the most established film festivals in North America and focuses on independent, experimental and documentary work. 

Ordinary Lives had in November 2005 also won the Best Documentary Kodak Award Student Competition at the 20th Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.

It has also been screened at many international festivals in recent months, among them the India International Women’s Film Festival, Golden Lion International Film Festival and the Washing DC Independent Film Festival. 

Asked about Agarwal’s strengths as a filmmaker, Dr Steve Fore, an Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media and a programme leader for the MFA programme that she graduated in, told DNA: “Sheetal is very good at getting her subjects  to open up to her, and to provide insights into their lives. This is in part because she respects the subjects of her works and is able to communicate that. She develops very good relationships without being intrusive.”

‘I’m intrigued by how space defines people’

As different as they are, Mumbai and Hong Kong have one thing in common, observes Sheetal Agarwal: a space crunch.  

“That was a connection I found intriguing, and I wanted to reflect on that in this documentary,” Agarwal told DNA from London.

“I saw that the limited space that a person lives in sort of defines his mentality, his behaviour, his ideas and his desires…. The conventions of a city are also formed by the space that people live in. And not only does the space define the people, the people in turn define the place they inhabit.”

That exploration drew her to make Ordinary Lives. “Having grown up in Bombay, I have always seen the slums, but I certainly had no first-hand experience of it.” 

Living in Hong Kong with her banker-husband, and reading about the slum demolitions in Mumbai, Agarwal felt drawn by the drama of a city in the throes of transition.

Is her documentary, then, to be interpreted as a commentary against the demolitions and the transformation of Mumbai? “Not at all,” she says. Reminiscing about Mumbai,

Agarwal confesses to an inability to resist the roadside pani-puri delights, but regrets that the breakdown of civic infrastructure was telling on the city.