Thief’s Bazaar (2023) Watch on Vimeo
Docuseries (10 x 35min) India
A Docuseries by John Company
The Canada Council for the Arts/ Manitoba Arts Council/ Winnipeg Arts Council/ CBC Documentary Channel
Synopsis: "What could be sold in this carnival? What intoxication could there be in this earth that the naive and innocent come to this crossroads of rushing and thieving? They are in search of their dreams that will clash with their dreams." Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found - Suketu Mehta ~
Drawing inspiration from Mehta's nonfiction novel and using a combination of direct cinema and impressionistic vignettes, Thief’s Bazaar is a 10-part docuseries that catapults us headlong into the lives of 10 unruly characters surviving the large-scale urban comedy/ catastrophe that is Mumbai.
Offering startling insight into this sharply divided and rapidly changing country, the series dredges Mumbai for raw unscripted reality, drawing to the surface a rich cinematic harvest often bordering on the absurd.
In this schizophrenic circus, where everything is equally true and false simultaneously, we are invited to consider how individuals (myself included) may allow themselves to fall prey to the so-called 'evils' of a place so as to be better prepared to survive them. Here, with an intoxicating mix of place and pageantry, hard reality and sublime fantasy are melded as one.
Rational
Currently the greatest rural to urban shift in human history is currently underway and will see between two and three billion people leave their largely rural lives behind and move into cities. With a population of 24 million, Mumbai ranks 7th largest and now holds the record for the most densely populated megacity with some parts hemming in more than one million people per square mile. As archaic infrastructure meets finite resources, the coping capacity of its citizens is pushed to the limits.
This project takes its name from the Chor (Thieves) Bazaar, a district I settled into shortly after my arrival. At the time, I didn't realize the significance and obvious metaphor. Theft, corruption and graft are an everyday part of life in many places, but over the months I began to recognize its staggering prevalence in the India I had returned to.
At the top, India's Congress Party ruled the nation despite the fact that dozens of MPs were facing serious allegations of corruption and even murder. Chief Ministers down to low level-politicians and everyone in-between. News reports could not keep up with the ongoing scandals. Everyone I met had a challenging story. With all this serving as a kind of societal barometer, corruption and survival became soft but relative themes in my exploration of the city.
With the 'official' economy subverted by an inaccessible consortium of corrupt politicians and businessmen, we need look no further than to the everyday lives of those who are left to survive in the 'unofficial' - but completely necessary - parallel economy to find the tangible consequence.
Approach - Production
As Mumbai plays itself, this series sets out to accurately represent the protagonists in the lives they are in fact living. Having met everyone on the streets, randomly and by chance, our time together ranged from a few hours to several years. These 'collaborators,' in their own unique way, were linked to the narrative I was developing and it's no secret that it's often those on the periphery who are living the most unusual and interesting lives.
Having said that, and in light of the West's often tired and stereotypical gaze on India, it's important to mention that this undertaking is not 'playing sympathy' for the 'underprivileged' or some other term that turns people into victims. The protagonists in this series are intelligent and tough and see themselves in this way. They don't need our virtue signaling pity.
Creative Approach - Post Production
Much has been said of India, a surreal landscape of acute contrasts and dizzying contradictions. Here in this, the clear choice was to subvert the raw material - through its careful treatment and assemblage - so that the protagonist's reality, and the reality that is Mumbai, comes across as largely fiction and otherworldly. Fortunately, India lends herself so wonderfully in this way.
In bringing the great weight of this experience forward, my intention is to create an authentic immersive experience that respects, and at times, rivals that of being in Mumbai. This is bold, impressionistic, hybrid ethnographic art cinema at its best!
Protagonists (Selected)
1989, five-year-old Lata (aka Mastani) and her abusive step-mother boarded a train for the 18 hour journey to Bombay. As the train arrived, Lata made her first great escape to begin an early life on the streets, alone.
Later arrested for vagrancy, she was placed in the Dongri Children's Remand Home where she learned to sing and dance while watching hundreds of Bollywood films. Released on her 18th birthday, she boarded a local train where she met a petty thief who taught her the fine art of pickpocketing. She would later have 4 children with him until their violent relationship exploded and the children were placed in state care.
Re-released from Byculla Women's Prison after another round of diamond theft and prostitution in 2015, the stage was set for her second great escape. In the infernal heat of a battered cinema hall, in the heart of what was once Asia's largest red-light district (Kamathipura), a worm hole leading 300 year into the past was about to open. As the film played out, Lata watched the legendary Mastani, a beautiful and brave woman skilled in arts, literature, and warfare. In the schizophrenic riot of image and song, Lata crossed a new threshold and consciously became the woman she saw on the screen before her.
Almost a decade has passed since her cinematic incarnation and this has given her strength enough to cope, but as the clock ticks, she is losing herself in the constructed fantasy. Desperately hoping to find someone who will truly love her, she continues to roam the streets and cinema halls hoping to find a man that will truly love her.
In 1957 (five years post India's Independence) a 14-year-old runaway boy named Ram Das (aka Sammy) climbed into a train bound for the city of his dreams. Settling into the British built port district Ballard Estates, he survives his early years on the streets through a combination of begging, shining shoes and washing taxis often using the money to see American films in dingy cinema halls.
Like most Hindu boys, Ram Das was taught to live an ethical life or suffer the karmic consequences, but as the years wore on he turned to theft, bootlegging, drug dealing and finally a rogue taxi driver.
Thief's Bazaar measures and follow Sammy’s desperate and often maddening life as he struggles to keep pace in one of the most difficult and demanding megacities on the planet. Flickering in his final twilight, he delivers his original hard reality narrative and how the city has both changed and shaped his perspective as well as rare insight into how much of the country is actually running. We will learn of his children's treacherous betrayal and of an undying love for his wife. His concept of, and relationship to, God will be explored in an attempt to understand the often hypocritical nature of it and how he attempts to justify it.
Although Sammy was part of a booming population influx into Bombay, his story reflects that of millions of others who have risked everything for a shared dream of upward mobility.
Raju Trailer
Raju is a cunning teenage street youth who spends much of his carefree time thieving to fuel his appetite for clothing and cinema. His mother was killed during one of the city's worst terrorist attacks. His heroin addicted, and former gang member father, roams the streets recycling trash to fuel his habit and numb his loss.
Raju is a cunning teenage street youth who spends much of his carefree time thieving to fuel his appetite for clothing and cinema. His mother was killed during one of the city's worst terrorist attacks. His heroin addicted, and former gang member father, roams the streets recycling trash to fuel his habit and numb his loss.
As Raju and his pickpocket pals fan out, their shoeless adventures take us across the city on the ground level as raw disarming reality unfolds around them. Grungy red light cinema halls, dive eateries and hyper dense train carriages, their limitless and unstoppable youth carries and propels them as they meet the city head on. Bullying and beatings are commonplace as the boys struggle to dominate one another and the entire city around them. As night falls, Raju returns to the same port district, where 60 years earlier, Sammy spent his youth growing up in much the same way.
If you are a young unmarried man without disposable income or don't somehow have access to an easy girlfriend, you’re somewhat limited in the kind of sex you will have. Fortunately the shemale queens Rani, Fifi and Gulzhar understand your situation and have their very own and deeply personal reasons to be out in the night.
Of the three friends, Gulzhar is the only Hijra (eunuch) and enjoys the power her status affords her. Using sex as a weapon, those within the Hijra community are both celebrated and feared for the supernatural power to bless and curse (black magic).
With India rapidly becoming the third largest producer of biotech in Asia, Gulzhar's dream is to become a mother to the child she will father.
Together these femme fatales take full advantage of the unending fountain of young men that magically appear before them. And despite all that you've heard about sex workers in places like India, this comic trio is a riot of great fun and easily turn the official narrative on its head.
It started slowly with alcohol, marijuana, then onto Afghan brown sugar (heroin). In and out of addiction centres, his family eventually disowned him. Now he works the eastern Harbour rail line where he and his colleagues 'liberate' mobile phones from the city's sleeping passengers as they shuttle in from the northern suburbs. One phone they will be high for a week, but Babaloo knows he's reached the end of the line, and by his own words, his next stop could easily be "jail, the insane asylum, overdose or death."
High above, the Eastern Freeway Bridge carries the city's elite to their estates across the harbour in Navi Mumbai. Under the bridge, lives Khan.
Once married with children, his wife grew increasingly dissatisfied with his ability to earn a living after reaching Mumbai from Bihar, North India. She eventually left him for a man who earned more, he then fell into drug abuse and theft. As with Babaloo, his relationships with the police allow him to continue, so long as they get a cut of the profits.
Thief's Bazaar will be a cinematic journey through time and space, and of people and place. Together and by contrast, these unique perspectives will serve to illuminate a shared set of circumstances that they and their fellow denizens have been cast into for the thin promise and narrow margin of survival.
Once married with children, his wife grew increasingly dissatisfied with his ability to earn a living after reaching Mumbai from Bihar, North India. She eventually left him for a man who earned more, he then fell into drug abuse and theft. As with Babaloo, his relationships with the police allow him to continue, so long as they get a cut of the profits.
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But from within this great ocean of humanity there exists a richness in character and spirit that is uniquely Indian and remarkably adept. And it is here, in their courage and resilience, that we may find a ray of light, in this city of dreams.
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