Snippets of Mumbai being showcased in LA

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Cities are inescapable muses, with artists thriving on the grime and glory, slums and skyscrapers of megalopolises. If New York City regularly turns into Martin Scorsese’s blood-drenched, bullet-scarred canvas, Paris becomes the love song for a series of short films Paris, je taime where everyone from the Coen brothers to Gurinder Chadha muses on its 20 arrondisements.

A similar movie on Mumbai, our own maximum city, the land of Dharavi and dons, Bollywood and bourses, was inevitable. Now 11 filmmakers are bringing together their shorts on the city in Mumbai Cutting, which will be the closing movie of the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles on April 27, before it releases in India on June 1.

The filmmakers, including Sudhir Mishra, Rituparno Ghosh, Jahnu Baruah, Revathy, Shashank Ghosh, Anurag Kashyap and Rahul Dholakia, zoom in on the different aspects of Mumbai and what it means to different people. So if Kashyap’s Pramod Bhai’s 23 is about delinquent juveniles, Rituparno ’s Urge is about the seductive pull of the city.

“For some, Mumbai is a city of dreams, while for others it is a hell hole,” says Mishra whose 10-minute film, The Ball, starring Soha Ali Khan, is shot under the JJ flyover in central Mumbai and is about a murder that took place in the metro over a decade ago. Kundan Shah’s 13-minute film, The Hero, meanwhile, is shot at the Goregaon station. “It’s about one character and the hardships he faces while travelling in a local train, an inescapable aspect of Mumbai,” says Shah. Shashank’s Ten Minutes is a drama revolving around four characters played by Ranvir Shorey, Tejaswini Kohlapuri, Shruti Seth and Rannvijay Singh. “It’s a film about the internal state of people. Ranvir portrays an executive who goes for a blood test and decides on the spur to get an AIDS test done as well. The movie is about what he goes through before the report comes in — the pain, the fear, the whole gamut of emotions,” says Shashank, who made Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II four years ago and will be releasing Quick Gun Murugun, a film in Tamil and English, in September.