Q2P - Documentary By Paromita Vohra: Events in Hyderabad

Here's a full-length film on public toilets. Well, we guess someone had to do it. Well, we guess someone had to do it.

The Hyderabad Film Club is screening a film titled Q2P, on 28th October, at the Preview Theatre of Prasad Film Laboratories.

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, 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.

Paromita Vohra, the diector, is also a writer. Her films as director include Where's Sandra (2005); Work In Progress (2004); Cosmo Polis - Two Tales of A City (2004) for which she won the award for mixing fiction and non-fiction, at the Indo-British Digital Film Festival; Unlimited Girls (2001), where she won the Women's News Award at the Women's International Film Festival, Seoul; A Short Film About Time (1999); A Woman's Place (1998); and Annapurna - Goddess Of Food (1995), a short fiction about a woman with a broken heart, her therapist and his watch (independently produced).

Her films as writer include the feature Khamosh Pani which won Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival, and Best Screenplay at the Kara Film Festival; the documentaries A Few Things I Know About Her which won the Silver Conch, MIFF and National Award; If You Pause - In A Museum of Craft; and Skin Deep.

She also teaches scriptwriting as visiting faculty at the Sophia Polytechnic, and is a Pukar associate.

Please contact the Hyderabad Film Club at 2373-0841 for further details.