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'Bombay Our City'
CITY LIMITS REVIEW
Sean Cubitt, London, Nov. 1985
For this
reviewer at least one of the most important films in the festival (London International
Film festival).
Completed this year in different countries, shot under appalling conditions
by the
prize-winning director of 'Time to Rise' and 'Prisoners of Conscience', this
is more than just a document of the urban shanty dwellers of Bombay, the attacks
on them and their struggle for survival and the right to live. Patwardhan goes
beyond the always relentless agitprop of his earlier films to question the film
crew's right to make it, and the role of the making of the film in building a
powerful association of slumdwellers to fight on their behalf.
Not shying away
from on-camera criticisms of their work, the crew become actively engaged in
fights, and veer away from Panorama-style gloss (dramatic shots of bulldozers
roaring in over people's homes) to serious questioning of the social structures
that have produced this scandalous regime, and an engagement with the subject
that converts sympathy into political action. At the same time, it raises the
important question for the Western viewer - by what right do I watch tales
of Third World poverty, of Third World agitation? Simply one of the best documentaries
I have ever seen.
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