Episode 1: Chhota Shehar
Acclaimed filmmaker Avijit Mukul Kishore, who is well known for his intimate portraits of people, places and changing urbanisms, leads The Third Eye’s flagship online curriculum called Filmy Shehar.
These masterclasses are conducted in Hindi with prompts in Devnagri to encourage a wider film theory discussion in the Hindi language, building a new audience in smaller towns of India to engage with the politics of the gaze.
Filmy Shehar deconstructs the ways cinema shapes our view of gender, caste, class, sexuality, and the multiple hierarchies that we assume are natural to the world we live in.
In Episode 1, we explore the small city, the B Town, the periurban; a site of deceit, sexual frenzies, gun toting masculinities if we believe our Hindi films.
But what do you believe? What place does the rural play in cinematic – and our – imaginations? Is the small town of cinema, and its protagonists, your town? What feels real and what seems constructed? Avijit Mukul Kishore draws a viewer’s attention to why certain images our made, who makes them, and who they may benefit, and asks his audience – folx from smaller towns, what idea of the city is eventually validated in our minds and hearts?
Watch Next Episode on Caste in Indian Cinema here
