‘My father’s village, my city’: Place-making in the cinema of NCR

Abstract

This article reads the emerging cinema of the National Capital Region (NCR) of India as a primary archive that documents urban transformation in the rapidly developing area and examines the representation of space within the same. Using three films set in the region – Aurangzeb (Atul ), Titli (Kanu ) and Gurgaon (Shanker ) – the article reads the effects of privatized city-making and the deeply unequal growth reflected within the diagetic place-making of the region and argues that theoretical frameworks like gentrification are not adequate to register the urban transformation in these postcolonial post-liberalization contexts, and that the films themselves serve as primary archives that offer a means to visibilize the unique nature of spatial change that also distort social ties in the region.