BENGALURU: Jawaharlal Nehru University PhD student Shaunak Sen’s debut documentary Cities of Sleep was screened a few times in the the city in the past few days.
The 74-minute documentary gives viewers a peek into the ‘sleep mafia’ of Old Delhi, an informal economic arrangement. As the rest of the city shuts down, bustling markets and public spaces are transformed into sleeping pockets for the homeless.
“In Meena Bazar, migrant labourers and rickshaw pullers pay `30,” Sen says. “At Loha Pull, a bridge across the Yamuna, the homeless arrange themselves around a TV.” A sign here reads `7 for three films or six hours’ sleep.
The daily-wage labourers who use the facilities can just about afford it, he says. “Most make `30 to `40 a day.”
Though the documentary looks into what the filmmaker calls an extra-legal arrangement, the work in no way ‘villainises’ those who run these. These people provide an essential service to help them survive the bitter cold of Delhi winters, he reasons.
“Those who have watched the film will see that it takes a very sympathetic view of them,” he says. For, the government night shelters are inadequate.
However, gaining their trust was quite a task. Sen made several visits to the Meena Bazar shelter before he took the camera. “They look at it with suspicion” because others who have visited them before have shown that it’s all too easy to paint them black. Such seasonal (read winter) visits by journalists, which serve no end, are all too common, he says.
Cities of Sleep, which premiered in the Mumbai Film Festival in November, was an outfall of Sen’s fascination with the humdrum of everyday life.
“I became interested in the philosophy of sleep after I read French writer Jacques Ranciere’s book,” he says. Whereas everyone is accustomed to looking at sleep through science or psychology, he wanted to explore the politics of it, he says.
Visits to government shelters led them to the facility in Meena Bazar, he says. And the unreliability of the protagonist Sen chose, Shakeel, made him scout around for another such structure, and the filmmaker stumbled upon the Loha Pull one.
“Shakeel was the classic unreliable narrator because his narrative changed every time,” Sen says. “So he made the documentary richer.”
While he spent nights over two years -- from after dinner to about 4.30 am -- shooting, Sen has refrained from becoming emotionally too close to his subject. “The film takes an objective view at the politics of sleep,” he says.
The documentary, doing the festival circuits, was screened at IIHS on Tuesday and Maraa on Wednesday