found green

i have given up trying to distinguish between video art, documentary and fiction, especially when it comes to films about bombay. somehow the city tends to make all of them completely interchangeable. here choksi is astounded at discovering timber mill on a space reserved for a recreational ground on the development plan. hello! welcome to the city! she then stages a narrative of a man re-introducing nature in the form of saplings on the streets and looking for the one living tree that is in the middle of a factory. at the end he sits below the tree on top of a roof eating an apple. beneath the rather naïve premise- perhaps made even more so by my tendency to make even more reductive summaries- seems to be a yearning for a return of nature as facilitator of leisure. a shading device for reclining bodies and afternoon naps. i like trees too, but am a little worried when flower pots colonize the pavements so that vagrants cant walk on them. and for some reason i felt disturbed by that tendency in the film.