Dir : Paromita Vohra 53’/ 2006 /English, Hindi
Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It peers through the dream of Mumbai as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets in Bombay with a small detour in Delhi, watching who has to queue to pee. As the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, we begin to also see the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; we learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; 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.
AWARDS: Best documentary, IFFLA, Los Angeles, 2007; Best Documentary, Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart, 2007
MUSEUM/EXHIBITION SCREENINGS: TATE MODERN GLOBAL CITIES EXHIBIT, 2007; LILLE 3000, 2006; BONN BIENNALE, 2006
FESTIVALS: Filmmor Women’s Film Festival, Istanbul (Feb 2008); Royal Anthopology Institute Film Festival, Manchester; Film Festival de Popoli; Ecovisione Film Festival, Florence; SAIFF (NY); Planet in Focus, Toronto; IFFLA; Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart; 3 Screens Film Festival, ISF New Delhi; VIbgyor Film Festival, Thrissur
Paromita Vohra is a leading documentary filmmaker, writer and curator whose work has focuses on urban life, popular culture, gender, politics and art. Her films have been widely screened in festivals, galleries and popular screening spaces, besides being included in university syllabi around the world.