Q2P is a film about toilets and the city. It peers through the dream of Mumabi as a future Shanghai and searches for public toilets in Bombay with a small detour in Delhi, watching who has to queue to pee. As the film observes who has access to toilets and who doesn’t, we begin to also see the imagination of gender that underlies the city’s shape, the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space; we learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s bottom half cobble together and quixotic ideas of social change that thrive with mixed results; 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.
Q2P - Film screeening
Movies
0.5 hrs
March 02, 2013 8:00 pm Saturday
Organizer
Paromita Vohra
How did one make a film about toilets which wouldn’t instantly have people giggling? How did one make a film about toilets and gender – indeed why would one – if it was just going to state in some sense the obvious? The obvious being: women don’t have enough public toilets, and this says something about the perception of their presence in public spaces?
The film began with some of these questions, which led me to a slightly simpler one – why did I want to make a film about toilets? Because, I realized, everyone pees, everyone shits and yet everyone is silent about it.
As time went by the effort was to make a film which would go beyond that obvious thing to make some connections and offer a way of thinking about the city and the world we want to remake as we rebuild our cities. To speak not just of the toilets, but of the city via the toilet.