By Sudharsanan Sampath
This is a film.
Not a narrative film. But maybe a documentary?
I don’t think it can be called a documentary. It is something.
I’ve been living a very nomadic life, moving from town to town, city to city and country to country. I’ve always liked visiting and living in a big city. Maybe not always. I didn’t know why I wanted to make this film. I think it was in Bangkok. I was in my high rise hotel room. I was in bed looking out the window. Looking at the rain drenched night city. That’s when I decided to make this film.
The moment I decided to make a film about cities, I knew I wanted to somehow emulate the grainy and burnt look of 16mm or 35mm. Of course it helps that I am a big fan of Wong Kar Wai and Andrei Tarkovsky. So I wanted to replicate a certain look for this. Shot this in many different countries and spent a lot of time color grading to achieve the film emulation. At this point, I am not sure if it’s any good. But I think it’s alright.
Hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed making it.
Sudha
January 7, 2023
Thanks for posting BR.
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Deepika
January 7, 2023
“That night I lay in my bed looking at the distant city lights, which never slept, but I did, eventually”..
A nice closure would have been the camera tilting all the way to the top of the buildings, as an opposite of the opening shot. I felt.. Sorry if you didn’t like the comment. 🙂
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Sudha
January 7, 2023
@Deepika – That actually would have been a great closure to that segment.
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Madan
January 7, 2023
This reaches me at the same time that I watch night descend on my first day in a new country, on work and not as a tourist! At the moment, I will simply say: somewhere in Africa.
It was a very interesting film, both the content and the context or, I should say, perspective. You commenting as a person who once found the big, bad city intimidating only to fall in love with them was rejuvenating in a way to hear for someone who has spent all his life in India’s most crowded metropolis. Where fascination at , say, the stream of umbrellas gets jaded over time. But the little story about your escape to Montreal also captured the capacity of a city to enable dreams of a better reality and intermittently make those dreams come true.
Have you spent time living in or visiting New York City or London? Would love to hear your thoughts on them. A similar, beautiful little film would be grand too.
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Aravindan R
January 7, 2023
Brilliant visuals and narration! I loved several moments. The one at 8:25 being the favorite. Thanks much for sharing.
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Sudha
January 8, 2023
@Madan – Africa sounds incredible. I might visit some friends in South Africa in the next year or so. Never been to London, or NYC, especially as a fan of Sherlock Holmes and plenty of noir thrillers set in NY. With regards to making more of this, I am currently developing a series which follows a traveling salesman, and each episode is based on different cities like Hanoi, HK etc. It’s a narrative series, but I am trying to bring the essence of the city being an observer into the episodes.
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Sudha
January 8, 2023
@Aravindan – Thank you. I remember my hands were in so much pain, but it was worth getting that shot.
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Madan
January 8, 2023
Sudha: Oh, I hope you do get to see NYC. lol, one of my vivid memories of being in NYC isn’t even particularly pleasant. We had been staying in Chicago at my aunt’s place for the past 2-3 days and there, motorists would stop to let a pedestrian cross the road. On our first day in NYC, we tried that and found the guy driving the van honked and just drove through (just to be clear, this was in the lane where our hotel was and definitely not a ‘stroad’). That was disappointing but then hardly unusual from an Indian vantage point and we got on with it. Manhattan is like a rainforest of skyscrapers, their towering heights forming a canopy of sorts. Albeit, that’s one part of Manhattan – near Empire State Building and thereabouts. There are lovely mixed-use/residential areas in Manhattan and it’s astonishingly walkable for such a densely populated city (with a huge floating population of commuters, tourists, etc).
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