Video by Gilles Aubry (2014, HD video, 32:40)

This work offers an immersive exploration of the contemporary film and television industry in Mumbai, focusing on the gritty, high-pressure world of Mahada. Often described as the “B-side” of Bollywood, Mahada is a neighborhood dense with small, studio-based businesses. In early 2013, Aubry spent two months documenting the sonic reality of this environment, recording everything from high-stakes castings and acting schools to the clatter of dress manufacturers and the focused energy of sound design studios.

While mainstream Bollywood increasingly targets a polished, global audience, the films produced in Mahada—primarily comedies and action movies—speak directly to people from India’s poorest provinces using local dialects. Aubry’s recordings capture the raw materiality of this production process. By blending the sounds of technology and special effects with the ambient noise of the neighborhood, the work reveals a “dream-factory” that is both creatively vibrant and economically precarious.

The artist’s role as an outside observer is framed through the lens of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film-essay, Notes Towards a Film About India. Just as Pasolini questioned the complexities of modernization on the streets of Bombay, Aubry’s work acknowledges the challenges of representing a “developing” society from an external perspective.

Presented as a “movie without pictures,” the installation functions as a soundtrack paired with text projections. The narrative occasionally adopts an updated version of a heroic Maharaja story, bridging the gap between Pasolini’s historical observations and Mumbai’s modern landscape. The experience is anchored by a hand-painted poster created by S. Rehman, one of the city’s last remaining traditional film-poster painters.

The work was commissioned for the Urban Sounds Exhibition at Haus fur elektronische Kunste Basel  (Sept -Nov 2013) and premiered as a movie at the International Documentary Film Festival in Marseille (FID) in July 2014.

Watch a documentation of the installation here.