• Archives

  • Meta

  • Hosts


    MIT

    MIT STS

  • Caterer


  • Search


    • Paromita Vohra

    Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer. She has written, produced and directed Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: Ek Manohar Kahani (2007) a documentary on moral policing and tabloid culture set in Meerut, Q2P (2006), a film about toilets, and the language of urban development with a focus on Bombay, Where’s Sandra (2005), a film about sexual and community stereotyping of Christian women, often referred to as ‘Sandra from Bandra’ in Bombay, Work In Progress (2004) about the World Social Forum which took place in Bombay in 2004), Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City (2004), a film that probes the myth of Bombay’s cosmopolitanism through the politics of land and food, which won an award at the Indo-British Digital Film Festival, Unlimited Girls (2001), an exploration of what feminism means to different people in urban India which has won several awards, A Woman’s Place (1998), a film about women’s legal strategies in India, South Africa and the USA (for PBS), Annapurna: Goddess of Food (1995) about an organization of women food workers in Bombay’s textile mill area which has been broadcast in 10 countries and A Short Film About Time (1999) a short fiction about a woman with a broken heart, her therapist and his watch. Her work as a writer includes the feature films Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters), about a woman whose life is transformed by growing fundamentalism in a Pakistani village (dir: Sabiha Sumar), for which she won the Best Screenplay award at the Kara Film Festival, 2003 and Khamoshi: The Musical (Additional Scriptwriting) (dir: Sanjay Leela Bhansali); the documentaries Skin Deep, A Few Things I Know About Her and If You Pause: In a Museum of Craft as well as a series of short fiction films on communal conflict for the People’s Decade of Human Rights Education (PDHRE).

    E-Mail

    parodevi@gmail.com

    Department Home Page

    http://

    Urban South Asia Posts by Paromita Vohra

    Q2P: Toilets and the City

    Friday, April 27th, 2007

    q2p_6b_poster.jpg

    The Students Council and Students of Color Committee of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the South Asia Forum at MIT invite you to a screening of the documentary film “Q2P” directed by Paromita Vohra on FRIDAY 27 APRIL at 6.00 P.M. in the Audio-Visual Theatre in Room 7-431 at DUSP, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139.

    Q2P

    (Documentary, 2005, 53 minutes, DV, English, Hindi)

    LOOK AT THE TOILET …
    … SEE THE CITY

    Who is dreaming up the global city? Q2P peers through the dream of a futuristic Mumbai 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.

    Posted in Film Screenings |