Ordinary Lives

Director’s Statement:

A motivation of this documentary is to reflect upon the impact of the physical environment on people’s mentalities, behavior and attitude towards life. Physical confinements create mental ones. Ideas, conventions and desires are often defined by the physical spaces that people live in. The lack or privacy often pushes relationships between spouses, children, and generations to the edge of crisis. While faceless organizations make their own agendas of development by turning slums into skyscrapers, I wanted to record how the life of these individuals is affected by government and other institutional plans.

Synopsis:

A documentary set in a slum in Mumbai, with the lives of a family of ten living in a 180 square feet shack at its center. The documentary attempts to highlight the social, cultural, infrastructure and political issues that affect the lives of ordinary people in Mumbai and their juxtaposition with the efforts to make Mumbai a modern city.

Background:

Mumbai is the financial capital of India, which is predicted to be the most populated city in Asia in 2020. Today, half of the city’s population—7 millions of people—are living in slums. Such demographics make the economic issues and infrastructural problems extremely severe. Studies and surveys on slum-related issues have been done by the Indian Government, NGOs and other research institute. While offering solutions to problems faced by the people living in areas of appalling housing, confined space, and extremely low incomes, various institutional surveys treat people there as figures rather than human beings. Although several studies and films have been done on the issues of slums, their major focus lies in housing, infrastructure and other environment related problems. How people are shaped by the confined living space and how do they define the place they inhabit are questions usually ignored.
Ordinary Lives uncovers the living conditions of residents in a slum in Mumbai, focusing closely on the daily struggles of one joint family with ten members of three generations crammed in a 180-squarefeet shack. Putting this family, which is at the bottom of social hierarchy, at the center of our documentary, this documentary attempts to give voices to the subordinate and poor—especially the young and the women. Their concerns are different from those of government officials, whose goal is to replace the slums with a new cosmopolitan (modeling after Shanghai) in Asia. Through a poised juxtaposition of voices from both inside and outside the slums, it aims to re-examine issues such as poverty, human rights, and gender equality that have been troubling India and other developing countries.

Sheetal S. Agarwal

Sheetal has a Masters in Fine Arts degree, majoring in documentary film making, from the School Of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She has been awarded the Michael Moore Award Best Documentary Film at the 44th Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Best Documentary KODAK Award for her thesis documentary "Ordinary Lives" at the 20th Annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. She has also received the Grand Prize at the Fifth Short Film Competition, Beijing Student Film Festival, for her first documentary "Home and Away" a documentary showcasing the lives of Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong. “Ordinary Lives” has been screened at several film festivals around the world, including Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Images of the 21st Century, 2006, American Anthropological Assn Conference, AFI FEST 2006 , UNAFF 2006. Sheetal is one of the eight students worldwide to have received the "Small Gifts Project" GRANT by Saatchi & Saatchi to direct a short film in China.