By filmmaker Faraz Ali's own admission, the idea of Shoebox began as a coffee-table book, before that idea morphed into a documentary and finally into the film that it is now.
Yet, watching the film, being screened in the Indian Cinema Now category at the ongoing 26th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in the capital, one would not associate it with an impersonal, glossy coffee-table book, except for the presence of some arresting frames of a city.
Shoebox is set around a time of the city's transformation, not only in its name, but in what it stands for. Ali began shooting the film when Allahabad was being renamed as Prayagraj. What was presented as a reclaiming of a long lost past was in a sense an erasure of more recent memories and even the lived present. The film draws a parallel between this transformation and a more personal story of Madhav, a Bengali living in Allahabad, who is fighting to retain the ownership of Palace Cinema, an old single-screen theatre in a prime piece of land where a builder wants to construct a multiplex.
It might be a coincidence that the film was being screened in one of Thiruvananthapuram's few single-screen theatres, although one owned by the State government. One can draw quite a few parallels to Giuseppe Tornatore's classic Cinema Paradiso, especially in the initial parts that showcase the joys of the single-screen theatre where an old potboiler starring Amitabh Bachchan is being screened.
However, it is also the story of the emotional, and often strained, relationship between the theatre owner and his daughter Mampu (Amrita Bagchi). The daughter, who takes up his fight, has visions of defeating the monsters she is standing up to, but these remain mostly as mental images.
Mampu's childhood is a testament to what forced uprooting does to people. Following a violent episode at school, Mampu is shifted to a boarding school in far away Pune. The scars of that shifting seem unhealed when she recounts the trauma of those days much later in the film.
Ali says he depended on both actors as well as non-actors, most of them from Allahabad, to get an authentic feel for the film. He even got real-life professionals to play their part, such as lawyers and cops. He also did not have the kind of production design he wanted for lack of budget, but that really doesn’t show.
Although the camera in its viewpoint seems to be distant and dispassionate, there is quite a lot of feeling invested in the film. The filmmaker seems to hold for the disappearing syncretic culture of the city the same kind of feelings Madhav has for the single-screen theatre. Shoebox is filled with a sense of loss for the times gone by and for the things erased.
