In partnership with Vikalp Film Archive

Quarter 4/11, by Ranu Ghosh (69’)

Shambhu Prasad Singh is a typical Indian “Common Man”

Nobody would ever imagine him to be a “fighter”. His labour quarters looks like an anachronism in the midst of 35 story high towers that are coming up all around it. It is Calcutta’s prestigious South City Project – Eastern India’s largest mixed use real estate development in South Calcutta. Shambhu has thrown a challenge to the very forces that have been trying to displace him from his own ground.

In the year 2003, Jay Engineering Works decided to sell off the property to a consortium of five major real estate magnates.  In a desperate rush Jay Engineering workers were handed over meager compensations and thrown out of the premises. Shambhu and his 13 colleagues refused to take forced volunteer Retirement. They filed a court case demanding respectable compensation.

By following Shambhu Prasad’s narrative, Quarter Number 4/11 explores the injustice that is built into the fabric of the ‘successful’ city. The city is undermined by the pain, exploitation and loss which are built into its fabric, and which remain a constant threat even to its most soaring structures and glittering monuments of modernity.