ABSTRACT
Soueid's film also observes that commercial quantifications of real estate and other forms of capitalist profit extraction have taken hold in Vietnam no less than in the United Arab Emirates. The first secret lies in the way the films delicately mirror the lives of the filmmakers, Mohamed Soueid and Anjalika Sagar. In the film Anjalika Sagar reads time-traveling letters to her grandmother, who traveled to Moscow with a delegation of the National Federation of Indian Women to meet their Russian counterparts. But beyond de-fetishizing the commodity by showing the labor that produced it, the Otolith Group show how the embroiderer's life is folded into and unfolds from the embroidered garment. India, where Otolith II carries out its gestures of unfolding, was a powerful player in the non-aligned movement of the Cold War. Later Otolith II finds the socialist internationalism of Nehru's era, so cheerily remembered by 'Mera Joota', embalmed in architecture.
