How this short film on climate change by Mumbai-based filmmaker showcases environmental crisis

The film questions the nature of urban development and accompanying changes

It began with a sound. City-based filmmaker Nikhil Katara's three-minute short film, Home is Here, was born as a response to a sustainability journal's call for submissions. The requirement was for writers to submit their interpretation of sound. Katara wrote a verse, but he wanted to add musical elements that engaged with ideas of creation and destruction. The result was a collaboration between him and three artistes: musician Kate Bass, sound designer Varun Gupta, and actor Mallika Bajaj who used movement to embody the theme. "For me, it was interesting to imagine it as a visual essay. I would write a song and then shoot it, but people who read the essay could only see the pictures and the words. What song plays in their head when they see these images and read the verse?" he says.

Nikhil Katara. Pic Courtesy/Mitesh Vaghela

Katara's film speaks about the environmental crisis. At the centre is a story of a leaf trying to find its tree but failing to do so. "Climate change is not a singular problem. We must find our own relevant solutions in our particular spaces," he tells us. The filmmaker had previously worked with writer Himali Kothari on a similar project called Between You and Me, inspired by the lives of Alibaug's fishermen communities. The two writers spent days having conversations with the fishermen, understanding the changes within the sea - the disappearance of dolphins and the effects of overfishing. "What does it mean to call something progress?" he recollects asking. Inquiring into this question again, he arrived at the new venture.

Mumbai played a huge role in the making of Home is Here. "The last shot of the film is against the background of a construction site in the city. I remember it being vibrant and green. But one day you wake up and suddenly, you see a part of it transfigured." He asks, then, that when we are urbanising our lands, undergoing redevelopment projects, how do we account for the greenery we're losing? A large part of the film was shot on the outskirts of Mumbai, near a waterfall that had dried up, along the Mumbai-Pune Highway towards Khopoli.

Home is here but how does one find harmony in our ways of living? This month, the film is scheduled to be screened in two Russian film festivals that promote
environmental consciousness: The International Ecological Festival ‘To Save and Preserve' in Khanty Mansiysk, and the Territory of Tomorrow in Nizhny Novgorod.

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