Found 221 results
2012
The main object in this film is an underground shelter repurposed for a kind of school that delivers pre-service training. The main character, an elderly teacher, also an archetype of Soviet ideology, does not seem to care about the contemporary political situation, instead opting to stay true to his own principles that have been inculcated into him through military service. His students couldn’t care less about the patriotism promoted in the schoolbooks from their teenage years; instead, they reserve their passions for the shooting ranges, inspired by computer games and Hollywood action movies. During the Cold war the political propaganda of the USSR and US produced a social phobia connected to the threat of nuclear war and the cult of defense. In modern Ukraine, many fallout shelters from the past have since been sealed. A few have been converted to serve new functions, adapted to different needs through individual creativity, spurred on by an overall lack of facilities.
The only film, made while still a student, by the promising cinematographer and director Uma Segal, who died in 1991. The film deals with slum demolition in Bombay, a major political issue in the early 80s (and also the subject of Patwardhan’s Hamara Shaher, 1985). It intercuts interviews with various concerned individuals, and ends with documentary shots of an actual demolition. Demolitions are nothing new. Over the years they have taken place again and again. Periodically municipal squads armed with crowbars smash through clusters of huts and cart away the debris of personal belongings in garbage vans. The films hopes to emphasize the injustice of a system which creates slums and then batters an already deprived population further by demolishing their homes. PUCL, lawyers collective and a citizen's vigilance committee debate the issue while people whose huts have been demolished relate their experiences.
