This article explores how, as India’s cities expand at breakneck speed, the public space that once defined them is silently disappearing. The winners of the 2025 Nagari Short Film Competition reveal how children, migrants, women, and streets themselves negotiate survival, joy, and memory in these shrinking urban commons — offering an urgent cinematic portrait of what is being lost, and what still resists.
Indian cities are expanding more rapidly than ever. Just over one-third of all Indians now live in cities, up from just 18% in 1960. Although the rate of urban growth in India has been relatively slow so far, it is now beginning to accelerate, posing many urgent challenges for India’s cities. These cities could be centers of a much larger and more efficient urban economy. Still, they are clearly hampered by long-standing issues like severe inequality, inadequate and overburdened infrastructure, and inconsistent public service delivery.
For the past six years, the Charles Correa Foundation has supported a growing collection of 7-minute documentaries by emerging Indian filmmakers that address these issues in their many forms through its Nagari initiative. Last week, the inaugural Nagari Film Festival, presented in collaboration with the 10th Serendipity Arts Festival, screened a selection of these films at a festival setting at the Maquinez Palace Theatre in Panaji, Goa, for the first time. I attended the awards ceremony on the opening night of the festival, and learned a great deal about how young Indian filmmakers are engaging with the implications of India’s rapid urbanisation in their practice.
Siddharth Kar and Susmita Talukdar’s Hissa offers a subtle but incisive meditation on urban belonging, examining how the politics of space are reflected through family, memory, and generational labour in India. By focusing on two migrant barber brothers whose livelihoods operate in a legal gray area, the film highlights how daily negotiations in Indian cities happen through informal acts of occupation and survival.
The choice of a child narrator is vital here: her voice adds an emotional softness that starkly contrasts with the harsh realities of dispossession. Her grandfather’s frog-and-fish fable serves as a structural device, framing migration as an ethical issue of coexistence rather than competition.
What makes Hissa unique is its refusal to frame the brothers’ divergent dreams within a moral hierarchy. Instead, it explores their contradictions — of return and rootedness, aspiration and resignation — reflecting the city itself. This approach makes urban displacement feel intimate, multigenerational, and painfully ordinary.
“You can rob many things from children but you can’t rob the games they play,” jury member Saurav Sarangi says about Pakdam Pakdai. The film approaches the urban public realm from below — quite literally — by aligning its gaze with children whose presence in the city is tolerated only insofar as it remains fleeting. Set in Agra’s congested Sadar Market, the film follows how balloon-selling children oscillate between labour and play, revealing their play not as escape but as strategy. Games become a method of spatial negotiation, allowing these children to momentarily disrupt a market designed for commerce, speed, and adult bodies.
The film’s strength lies in its restraint: it resists sentimentality while still foregrounding tenderness, humour, and improvisation as tools of survival. Lively cinematography mirrors the children’s kinetic energy, while the filmmaker’s closeness to their rhythms ensures that agency is never eclipsed by pity. Pakdam Pakdai ultimately reframes children’s play as an act of resistance — ephemeral, fragile, yet deeply political — through which excluded bodies briefly reclaim the right to exist and belong in the city.
Mauj ni Khoj locates the public realm in five-minute intervals of stolen joy. Set in Bhuj, the film follows two young Muslim women whose friendship becomes both refuge and rehearsal for freedom within a tightly policed social landscape. The claustrophobic ghetto where they live appears as a paradoxical space — intimate yet constantly surveilled — where safety, propriety, and risk are constantly renegotiated. “Mauj” emerges here not as leisure but as tactic: laughter, wandering, and shared glances function as refusals of enclosure within the veil mandated by Islam. By avoiding overt commentary, Mauj ni Khoj allows the textures of everyday life to reveal the gendered boundaries of public space.
The restrained but attentive cinematography by Badal Maheshwari and Isha Thakkar honours the women’s interiority without sensationalising constraint. The film suggests that freedom need not be spectacular to be meaningful. In small cities like Bhuj, joy itself becomes an act of resistance: fragile, fleeting, and transformative.
Mahadwar is a reflective elegy for a street caught between memory and modernity, using the intimate scale of personal recollection to examine the violence of urban “progress”. By centering its narrative on Mahadwar Road, a historic street in Kolhapur once vibrant with trade, devotion, and daily life, the film portrays the street as a living archive shaped by commerce, ritual, and everyday life. Filmmaker Adwaita Patil’s first-person voiceover is key to this perspective, framing the street's redevelopment as a personal loss for its residents and users. Nostalgic visuals and layered soundscapes challenge the spectacle of demolition, instead emphasizing textures, pauses, and lingering traces of life.
This restrained approach profounds the film’s political message, questioning whether expansion can truly capture the intangible histories embedded in a place. As redevelopment approaches around the Mahalaxmi Temple, Mahadwar views urban change as an act of erasure that extends beyond mere geography. Ultimately, the film suggests that when streets vanish, it’s not just space that disappears but collective memory — and with it, the potential for continuity in the public domain.
Follow @nagarishortfilmcompetition on Instagram to learn more about the initiative.
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