November 1: Q2P Documentary on Private vs. Public Space

Q2P: A Documentary by Paromita Vohra
Thursday, November 01, 2007 4:15 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.

The New School for General Studies Bachelor’s Program, the India-China Institute, and the South Asian Faculty Forum present a screening of Q2P, a documentary by the Indian filmmaker Paromita Vohra.

Q2P envisions the Mumbai of the future and finds … public toilets—or, rather, not enough of them. As the film observes who has to queue to pee, we become aware of the constantly shifting boundaries between public and private space. We meet people with novel ideas for social change, which produce mixed results, and learn of the strategies the city’s poor use to survive. In the Museum of Toilets, at a night concert, in a New Delhi “international toilet,” in a Mumbai slum, we hear the silence that surrounds toilets and sense its connection to the silence that surrounds inequality. The toilet becomes a riddle with many answers, and some of those answers are questions—about gender, about class, about caste, and most of all about space, urban development, and the twisted myth of the global metropolis.

Paromita Vohra’s recent films include Morality TVand Loving Jihad (2007), on moral policing and tabloid culture in Meerut, a city in northern India; Where’s Sandra (2005), about the stereotyping of Christian women in Mumbai; and Work in Progress (2004), about the World Social Forum that took place in Mumbai in 2004.

66 West 12th Street, room 404
Free; no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served