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Dharavi
aka Quicksand 1991 116’ col Hindi d/s Sudhir Mishra pc NFDC/Doordarshan dial Atul Tiwari, Pranay Singh c Rajesh Joshi m Rajat Dholakia lp Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Raghuvir Yadav, Chandu Parkhi, Virendra Saxena, Pramod Bala, Satish Khopkar, Mushtaq Khan, Shakti Singh, Madhuri Dixit
Om Puri plays Rajkaran Yadav, an emigré taxi driver from U.P. living in Bombay’s notorious Dharavi slum. His wife Kusum (Azmi), living in a one-room tenement with his mother, works to contribute to her husband’s ambitious dream of owning a factory. However, the business enterprise is a disaster as the taxi driver gets embroiled with gangsters, forcing his wife to return to her first husband. The ending shows Yadav as boundlessly optimistic as he was at the outset. The film tries to transform the conventions of realism usually deployed for such stories (cf. Chakra, 1980) with surreal effects including the hero’s oscillations between fact and fantasy (the latter with Hindi superstar Madhuri Dixit). The opening sequence announces the film’s intentions as a Hindi movie being screened to slumdwellers in the open air is abruptly ended when the screen catches fire and the audience riots.