‘BMCLD' by Shreela Agarwal

Hindustan Times

3 days ago

Often, the point of a film is purely polemical — when the visual medium is a vehicle for social engagement. There are filmmakers who invent languages to alchemise personal histories on the margins of majoritarian experiences, megacities and social systems.
Shreela Agarwal, 25, has won a Gold from the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in the short documentary category for her film on a boxing club that thrived in Mumbai's margins for exactly this brand of filmmaking. It's a film set largely in a matchbox dwelling in Mumbai, and some of its precarious peripheries.
The BMCLD (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation Labour Department) boxing club was founded in 1962 by Rohinton Sethna and sustained with irrepressible passion by state champion and national-level pugilist Bipin Mahida. Over several years, generations of children and teenagers from Mumbai's slums have found purpose and impetus to navigate life in the margins from it.
There was a time when boxing in India was dominated mostly by Parsis. Until the 1960s, most national champions were Parsis.
Sethna was part of the BMC Welfare Development Program. Parsis typically speak Gujarati, and Sethana came to know about the Gujarati community living near Tulsivadi in Mahalaxmi. He recognised both the talent and the socio-economic challenges ofthe people there and decided to open a boxing centre in the area.
That's how the BMCLD club began. Agarwal says, 'He coached there and was also a respected referee. He had been a boxer himself, and over time, he trained many champions—some of whom continue to carry on his legacy.'
The BMCLD community is, as the illustrious book by Katherine Boo on life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity calls, 'behind the beautiful forevers'. And Agarwal's film, BMCLD, is, first, an unflinching look not just at this community's grit, beauty and will to thrive. It's also a familiar reminder of how much of a toll it can be for Mumbai's dispossessed to claim their space and their passions in it.
Agarwal came to the world of boxing while studying to be a filmmaker. While completing her bachelor's degree in filmmaking from the Lasalle College of the arts, Singapore, she began training as a boxer.
'I trained for almost a year. When Covid hit, I returned to India. I thought I'm going to continue from Bombay, and compete from there. That's how I met my coach, Bipin Mahida and came to know about this club,' Agarwal says.
A serious eye tear during a match kept her out of competitions for a long time, but the BMCLD and its coach continued to be her succour and strength.
'I was in a kind of an existential crisis before I started filming this. I felt it important to step away from the craft to experience life,' Agarwal says. 'At BMCLD, under my coach, I understood what it took for power to flow from my shoulders. It is a spiritual relationship with him.'
In its short running time of just under five minutes, BMCLD unfolds with stark-realist documentation of the club's members at work — mostly boys, training before the city wakes up— inside the small slum quarter which is BMCLD's home and where they practise their hooks and clinches under neon lights.
'Half of the film's footage is archival or phone camera videos and the other half is where my Canon 1dx Mark 2 captured them. In post-production, I matched it all out,' Agarwal explains.
There's a phone camera shot of a BMC bulldozer razing the BMCLD home to the ground — austere, grainy, and when juxtaposed with static shots of aspiring boxers, almost like a 2024
iteration of filmmaking in the 90s' Dutch tradition of Dogme filmmaking, which sought to get rid of all technical flourishes and gimmicks to extract the power or message of a story without really
spelling it out.
An example of the best kind of guerrilla filmmaking,the narrative of BMCLD combines real time footage with animation by Anita Agarwal, the writer-director's mother, who is an animation artist.
'The animation was completed on her personal iPad,' Agarwal says.
After being demolished from its home, the BMCLD began training at the premises of the Mahalakhsmi racecourse.
'They have recently got a space dedicated to them, where they will soon start training,' Agarwal says.
This is Agarwal's third work after The Keeper (2018), a sensitive exploration of family and cultural identity, which screened at Euroshorts, Fresh Wave Hong Kong and the Arc Film Festival, and My Brother (2020), about immigration and sibling dynamics, which premiered at the Singapore International Film Festival and went on to be screened at the New York Indian Film Festival and Dharamshala International Film Festival.
At the MAMI Mumbai Film festival, two indie film pioneers noticed Agarwal's distinctive storytelling signature — writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane (Court, 2014; The Disciple, 2020) and Naren Chandavarkar (Moonweave Films, which is behind the recent film festival favourite Baksho Bondi). They are mentors on Agarwal's ongoing docu-fiction project Ringside Dreams, which is being developed, based on the premise of BMCLD.
Agarwal's voice as a filmmaker and socially-engaged storyteller is one to look forward to in contemporary Indian cinema.
(Short Stream is a monthly curated section, in which we present an Indian short film that hasn't been seen before or not widely seen before but is making the right buzz in the film industry and film festival circles. We stream the film for a month on HT Premium, the subscription-only section on hindustantimes.com.
Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at [e-mail])