“Look at the toilet, see the city”
Via email from Paromita Vohra, a note about the screening of her film Q2P at the Tricontinental Film Festival, Mumbai on 4 February at 4:30 pm, at the NCPA, Nariman Point:
Q2PFestival schedule here.
Documentary, Digital Video, 54 min., English/Hindi“Look at the toilet, see the city”
Who is dreaming up the global city? Q2P peers through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai 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.
