Meet Rubel, a fourteen year old boy smuggling rice from India to Bangladesh. He has to cross the river Ganga, which acts as an international border. The same river eroded his home in mainland India when he was just four. Years later, a fragile island called Char was formed within the large river. With his family and a herd of homeless people, Rubel decided to settle in this barren expanse controlled by the border police from both the countries. Rubel dreams of going to his old school in India but reality forces him to smuggle stuff to Bangladesh. After a scorching summer, dark monsoon clouds roll on, the river swells up again. We see the edges of the island cracking. Char may disappear someday but we won’t—smiles the boy.

The film emerges from a recently issued government order in Mumbai which reduced the age limit of the iconic black and yellow Padmini taxis to a maximum of 20 years. What this means is that in a few years from now, the charming yet robust Padmini taxis will have vanished from the streets of Mumbai, taking away with it the livelihood of many who depend on it for their day to day survival. The film explores the various ways in which the government-imposed age limit affects the livelihoods of the taxi drivers on the one hand and shatters a peripheral economy around the taxi on the other. The four protagonists of the film talk about issues of migrant labor, the status of taxi drivers and the importance of taxis in the city of Mumbai through their own personal narratives, thereby offering a ringside view of the changing city and its invisible workers.

Tichi Goshta (Her stories) by Farred Muhammed, Milanth Gautham, Ridhima Sharma, Shiva Thorat & Silja Wurgler
Duration: 0:15:12

An attempt to challenge the conventional male-centric way of looking at histories. Her stories revolves around the lives of Vaishali Girkar, Sulekha Rana and Laxmi Dhamanse—all of them former mill workers. The film explores their life in the mills, their struggle after the strike of 1982 and the way in which they continue to negotiate the personal with the political. The owner of a food stall in Worli, an artist, and a broker respectively today, Vaishali , Sulekha and Laxmi are successful independent women in their own right but the mills and the great textile strike of 1982 continues to be an important part of their lives that they cannot and do not wish to forget. In fact, theirs is also a struggle to keep the legacy of the mills alive.

The documentary film is about a poor ‘street family’, which makes their living by disguising children as Mahatma Gandhi (Father of The Nation – India). The film is a comment on the poverty-stricken situation of street-children and the use of Gandhiji’s image to make money.