The Urban Lens Film Festival that will be held between November 18 and 21 includes a couple of premieres, international films and panel dis...
The Urban Lens Film Festival that will be held between November 18 and 21 includes a couple of premieres, international films and panel discussions. The eighth edition of the festival will be held online, like the previous year. Viewers can register on the Urban Lens website for free to watch the 27 films.
Among the new titles is Coral Woman director Priya Thuvassery’s City Girls. The short documentary profiles two migrant women who have moved to Delhi from Banda in Uttar Pradesh. The women reveal the joys and challenges of migration, the struggles they have overcome to get to the capital, and the meaning of the big-city experience for small-town women.
The other premiere is of Sex [Work] and the City, a historical documentary on the manner in which the sex trade has shaped morality and urbanity in Kolkata. Subject experts Paromita Chakravarti and Dipta Bhog use archival photographs, maps, illustration and present-day footage to make their argument that by the nineteenth century, sex workers were as instrumental in shaping Kolkata as British administrators and middle-class Bengalis.
“The sex worker was almost the heart of the public discourse in the nineteenth century,” an unseen woman notes in the voiceover. “She was helping in constructing the spheres of the private and the public, and also helping...
