Bangalore City, the realm of migrant workers. A realm that can be found right behind the station or on the other side of the railway, where the big scaffolds are, among which you see squat corrugated iron huts one might (and probably has to) call provisional, where people have built a few makeshift square metres to live in. When life itself has become a construction site, dreams fly away. Love is mainly a memory or desire, in other words, the past or the future. In the world of today it’s mostly a gap. So stories of love become all the more important. Told or heard directly or absorbed from Bollywood via tiny mobile phone screens and speakers, these stories also supply adaptable patterns in whose intricate plots the boys on the construction sites can easily imagine themselves as actors.
Yashaswini Raghunandan and Ekta Mittal show the same sure instinct and brilliant cinematic intuition they did in their first film as they follow the fleeting auras of people and places – last year, their film “Presence” was also screened in the Leipzig competition. And they once more un-fold (in the true sense of the word) realities that would otherwise remain inaccessible to us.

Ralph Eue

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Golden Dove in the International Short Documentary Competition 2013

An elevated railway construction site in a big Asian city: a transit space, the new nibbling away at the old, frictional losses between remembering and forgetting, a teeming wasteland, a growth in the old city’s tissue. The population of this site consists of workers, mainly working nomads from far away. They bring not only their manpower but their own and highly diverse customs, traditions and (hi)stories. These stories are like bottled genies and sometimes, usually at night, they resume their shape in the telling, flowing out of their narrow vials to haunt the half finished railway tracks, marauding component parts and provisional handrails. Sometimes beautiful, occasionally dreary, even scary, these spooks reach our ears. The visible reality doesn’t care, would deny having anything to do with these goings-on. But for the duration of this film, reality has been expanded, filled with the fleeting aura of the supernatural.

– Ralph Eue