Rohan Shivkumar

Lovely Villa explores the relationship between architecture, everyday life, family, desire and the idea of ‘home’. Director Rohan Shivkumar grew up in the titular apartment block, located in Borivali —an affluent coastal suburb of Mumbai. The building was designed by Charles Correa to house different communities within one edifice, as an articulation of the ideal environment for the Indian middle classes. Rohan, whose parents lived in the colony for over 40 years, explores its architecture with the aid of found materials, including old photographs and drawings, as well as personal narratives both factual and semi-fictional.

Kaushik Mukhopadhyay assembles and pairs discarded and broken household gadgets into unexpected cyborg-like creatures that occupy the space between machine, toy and home. His objects are quirky, humorous and noisy which tend to break down sometimes. The Film brings to light these narratives of unexpectedness, embodying fragments of political, personal and art history.

‘Nostalgia for the Future’ is a film on Indian modernity, the making of the citizen and the architecture of the home. It looks at imaginations of homes across four examples of buildings made over the period of a century. These are Lukhshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda – the gigantic home built by a progressive monarch in the late 19th Century; Villa Shodhan in Ahmedabad – a private residence which represents the idea of domesticity within Nehruvian modernity, designed by Le Corbusier; Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, which epitomises the Gandhian aspirations of the nation-state; and public housing in post-independence Delhi, designed by the Government of India to house refugees from Pakistan and the bureaucrats of the newly independent nation.