NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE

Documentary film, Hindi and English with English subtitles, 16mm film and Digital Video, Colour and B/W, 54 minutes, 2017.

Screenings

Pinakothek Moderne, Munich, 2020

Chicago Architecture Biennial, September 2019 to January 2020.
Dhaka Art Summit, 2018.

Documenta 14, Athens, 2017.

Over 100 screenings at film festivals, cultural and academic fora in India, USA, Europe and East Asia.

Awards

Best Documentary Prize at IDSFFK, Trivandrum, 2017
Jury’s Special Mention at Signs Festival, Thrissur, 2017

Direction – AVIJIT MUKUL KISHORE and ROHAN SHIVKUMAR
Produced by – FILMS DIVISION INDIA
Script – ROHAN SHIVKUMAR
Camera, Editing and Narration – AVIJIT MUKUL KISHORE
Sound Recording – ASHEESH PANDYA
Additional Sound Recording – SURESH RAJAMANI
Sound Post-production – GISSY MICHAEL
Assistant Director – SABARI PANDIAN

‘Nostalgia for the Future’ is a film on Indian modernity, the making of the citizen and the architecture of the home. It looks at imaginations of homes across four examples of buildings made over the period of a century. These are Lukhshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda – the gigantic home built by a progressive monarch in the late 19th Century; Villa Shodhan in Ahmedabad – a private residence which represents the idea of domesticity within Nehruvian modernity, designed by Le Corbusier; Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, which epitomises the Gandhian aspirations of the nation-state; and public housing in post-independence Delhi, designed by the Government of India to house refugees from Pakistan and the bureaucrats of the newly independent nation.

The film explores these spaces and imagines the bodies that were meant to inhabit them through the evocation of the cinematic and aural collective memory of a nation. It uses a mix of formats – 16mm film and digital video in both colour and black and white, along with archival footage from state propaganda films and mainstream cinema.

The film is a collaboration between film maker Avijit Mukul Kishore and architect Rohan Shivkumar. It emerges from the intersection of their respective disciplines – architecture and documentary film, both of which have been ingrained in the discourse of utilitarianism and certainty. The film opens these disciplines out to self-critique and looks at their role in imagining and constructing a nation and its citizen.

The film is produced by Films Division India.