ABSTRACT
The second chapter attends to the interplay between residents and films in Toba Tek Nagar. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on a YouTube crime series produced by members of a youth group who aspire to become a part of the film industry while simultaneously struggling with stigmas and identities associated with living in a poorer Muslim slum locality. For them, filmmaking affords a space to rehearse, improvise, play-act, try out new roles, as well as recognize spaces in the locality as sets for film scenes. This “recognizability” of the self and the locality in films, I show, allows the youth to depart from the hierarchies, identities, and roles assigned to them and their locality. The second part of this chapter focuses on film reception in the video theaters of Toba Tek Nagar. The latter are primarily spaces for local and immigrant men, who otherwise rarely interact with each other, to watch films from different parts of the country with each other. However, this audience isn’t merely engrossed in watching films; they often sleep, spend their time between work and sleep, wait out time without work, talk on phones to their employers and families, and discuss films and everyday news. Furthermore, this film reception is every day and repetitive, whereby the audience watch the same films over and over again. These repetitions coupled with the movement across different times and spaces, I show here, extend and transform the space of the video theaters into avenues for journeying into other worlds.
