Screening
Asian New Force Category Finalist

Playgrounds

Shamik Sen Gupta、Pallavi MD

India / Col / 18' 08" / In Indian with English subtitles

During a game of hide “n” seek, 3-year-old Murli hides in an auto rickshaw and falls asleep. He wakes up in a different neighbourhood with an angry man shouting at him. But Murli can’t understand him and just wants his mother. The angry man grudgingly sets out to take him back home.

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Finalist Showcase: 4/3 (Fri) | 7:15pm | agnès b. CINEMA | DCP | 193’ | HK$ 65/35* | With after-screening discussion

Artist’s Statement

The idea of habitat is at the heart of our query in the film Playgrounds. Though it is not the central theme of the film, it is the context in which a story of conflict for survival unfolds. India’s cities are growing rapidly; office complexes and apartment buildings are springing up everywhere. Building these architectural behemoths is a migrant workforce of unskilled labourers coming from the hinterlands. Ironically, the men and women who build these habitats for the upwardly mobile middle-class, themselves live in dark shanties beneath the towers. The title of the film alludes to the loss of innocence for everyone - the lost child, his labourer parents and the auto rickshaw driver - none of them are quite the same by the end of the conflict.