Jari Mari is a sprawling slum colony adjacent to Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji international airport. Its narrow lanes house hundreds of small sweatshops where women and men work, without the right to organise. Their existence is on the edge – their illegal dwellings could be demolished at any time by the airport authorities, and jobs have to be found anew everyday, from workshop to workshop. This film explores the lives of the people of Jari Mari, and records the many changes in the nature and organisation of Mumbai’s workforce over the past two decades.
Surabhi Sharma is a filmmaker, educator and curator. She has worked on several feature-length documentaries apart from some short fiction films and video installations. Her key concern has been documenting cities in transition through the lens of labour, music and migration, and most recently reproductive labour. Cinema verite and ethnography are the genres that inform her filmmaking.