Vertical City

"A visual essay on the architecture of a dystopia." – The D-Word

A new place has been built for some of Mumbai's many slum-dwellers: a high-rise building in the city's outer suburbs. Is this an act of kindness, or erasure? And what effect does such a relocation have on a community and on the individual?

In Vertical City, director and prolific cinematographer Avijit Mukul Kishore eschews conventional documentary techniques; merging footage of busy cityscapes and oppressive interiors with the overheard testimony of the building's inhabitants. The end result is a chilling, often mesmerising portrayal of modern Mumbai and the global phenomenon of poverty; the film revealing the darker side of supposedly philanthropic government policy.