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CSAS Film Screening | Cities of Sleep

Followed by a discussion with Filmmaker, Shaunak Sen
Thursday, March 9, 2017
4:00-6:00 PM
Room 1644 School of Social Work Building Map
‘Cities of Sleep’ (dir: Shaunak Sen) takes us into a heady world of insurgent sleeper’s communities as well as the infamous ‘sleep mafia’ in Delhi where just securing a safe sleeping spot often becomes a question of life and death for a large number of people.

The film trails the lives of two individuals, Shakeel and Ranjeet. Shakeel, a renegade homeless sleeper has for the last 7 years slept in a diverse range of improvised places like subways, under park benches, parking lots, abandoned cars and lately, at areas controlled by the sleep mafia. The film follows his attempts to secure a safe sleepingspace just around the time the infamous winter rains of Delhi are due.

Ranjeet runs the ‘sleep-cinema’ community in Loha Pul in Delhi, a huge double-storey iron bridge straddling the banks of the river Yamuna. A thin strip of land under Loha Pul houses shanty cinemas where over 400 odd homeless come and sleep through the day for a nominal price. The flooding of the river Yamuna poses a threat to the people sleeping there every monsoon.

The film looks at not only the tremendous social and political pressure that sleep exerts on the homeless in the city but is also a philosophical exploration of sleep at large.

Official facebook page: https://goo.gl/B3lYx3

SHAUNAK SEN is a filmmaker, video artist and film sholar based in Delhi. ‘Cities of Sleep’ (2016) his first feature length documentary film that has shown and won awards at various major international film festivals including the Dok Leipzig, Taiwan International Film Festival, the Seattle South Asian Film Festival among others.

He co-curated a live-event installation called Downtime held simultaneously at Delhi and Berlin (at the Goethe Institute in New Delhi and Neukölln in Berlin) in November 2014. He also co-curated a live performance/video installation event 'Notes on Mourning' at Khoj Studios in January 2015 (co-curated by Arnika Ahldag and Amitesh Grover). He attended the Copycat Academy Residency, curated by Hannah Hurtzig at the Luminatos Film Festival in Toronto in June 2015. He has received the Pro Helvetia residency in Switzerland for 2016. He curated the group exhibition ‘A Brief History of Horizontality’ in Bern, Switzerland in May 2016.

Shaunak was also the recipient of the Digital and Social Media Fellowship from Sarai in 2014, as well as the Films Division of India Documentary Film Fellowship in 2013.. A mass communication graduate of AJK MCRC Jamia Milia, New Delhi he is currently enrolled as a PhD student at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawahar Lal Nehru University in Delhi. His academic writing has been published in various journals including Bioscope and Widescreen. He has also worked as a journalist for Tehelka and as a freelance investigative journalist for other media portals.
Building: School of Social Work Building
Event Type: Film Screening
Tags: Film, India, Poverty
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Center for South Asian Studies, International Institute, Asian Languages and Cultures