Q2P

Look at the toilet, see the city

Documentary | 53 min | English & Hindi | India | 2006

When you look at the toilet, you can see the city. Q2P peers through the dream of Mumbai as a global city and finds…public toilets… not enough of them.

As this film observes who has to queue to pee, we begin to understand how suppositions about gender, caste and class determine the shape of the city. Entering and exiting through the portal of the toilet we realize how the boundaries of public and private space keep shifting.

We meet whimsical people with novel ideas of social change, which thrive with mixed results. We learn of small acts of survival that people in the city’s lower depths cobble together. In the Museum of Toilets, at an all-night concert, in a New Delhi “international toilet”, in a Bombay slum, 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.

Awards

• Best documentary, IFFLA, Los Angeles, 2007
• Best Documentary, Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart, 2007

Museum/Exhibition Screenings

• Tate Modern Global Cities Exhibit, 2007
• Lille 3000, 2006
• Bonn Biennale, 2006

Festivals

• Filmmor Women’s Film Festival, Istanbul, 2008
• Royal Anthopology Institute Film Festival, Manchester
• Film Festival de Popoli
• Ecovisione Film Festival, Florence
• SAIFF, New York
• Planet in Focus, Toronto
• IFFLA
• Bollywood and Beyond, Stuttgart
• 3 Screens Film Festival
• ISF New Delhi
• Vibgyor Film Festival, Thrissur

BUY Q2P – INDIA / INTERNATIONAL