Like films set in Bombay rather than Mumbai and Madras rather than Chennai, Faraz Ali’s Shoebox is about Allahabad rather than Prayagraj. ...
Like films set in Bombay rather than Mumbai and Madras rather than Chennai, Faraz Ali’s Shoebox is about Allahabad rather than Prayagraj.
Through the story of a movie theatre owner and his relationship with his daughter, Ali and co-writer Noopur Sinha explore the ways in which a gentrifying city is experienced, remembered and memorialised. Shoebox was shot in 2018, with the Maha Kumbh festival as a backdrop. That year, the Adityanath-led government in Uttar Pradesh renamed Allahabad as Prayagraj.
Shoebox marks this erasure through the journey of Palace Cinema from a thriving single-screen cinema to a shuttered shell. Palace Cinema matters deeply to its owner Madhav (Purnendu Bhattacharya), a Bengali settled in Allahabad, and his daughter Mampu (Amrita Bagchi).
As a child, Mampu and her friend Kaustubh (Ashutosh Sohan) have bunked school to linger in Palace Cinema’s darkened and inviting interiors. As an adult, Mampu returns to the city to encounter an ailing Madhav, attempts by a builder to take over Palace Cinema and memories of bruising encounters with her father.
Shoebox joins a raft of independent Indian films that chronicle the links between memory and lived spaces. Achal Mishra’s Gamak Ghar (2019) traces the life cycle of a house in a village in Bihar. In Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s...
