Edition of 10 + 2 AP

Gigi Scaria explores the levels of authorship that are often hidden by the term ‘documentary’ with his film works ‘A Day With Sohail and Mariyan’ (2004) and’Search’ (2006), both of which follow the lives of young workers in the streets of Delhi. Scaria met Sohail and Mariyan at a community centre and gradually built up a relationship with them. Eventually they asked him to accompany him over the course of a night collecting waste, and Scaria produced a film that is partly observational, partly loosely-scripted in order to create what he has described as “a fictional documentary but not exactly following the documentary mode.” By consciously acknowledging a level of scripting, Scaria undermines the traditional notion of documentary and suggests that our need to know these previously unknowable subjects is always dependent on authorial construction. Moreover both Sohail and Mariyan were involved in decision-making processes as to what would be filmed – so the work can be read as testifying to Sohail and Mariyan’s self-fashioning. A subsequent film, ‘Search’ follows a young boy who uses a powerful magnet to find iron hidden amongst the debris in the city – but in this wordless film it is not clear what, if anything, is scripted. Thematically in both works, Scaria returns to a theme that runs through all his oeuvre; that of how the migrant and the worker re-make and re-map the city according to the needs of their own lives.