Pressure

A portrait of Mumbai as a pressure cooker. The city could boil over at any moment. The attacks in November 2008 only serve to up the ante. Pressure feels as if the makers, and the viewers too, have suddenly landed in a pandemonium: Mumbai (Bombay). Life in this human ants’ nest occasionally turns out to be still rural and small-town. In ’Pressure’ the metropolis - a disorderly collection of enlargement of scale, differentiation and an increasing complexity - is made small and thus comprehensible. In contrast to the other films of Dietvorst and Villevoye, this work does not concentrate on people in the bushes but families that live by the edge of the sea. Much conflicts today seem reducible to the antagonism between the city and the countryside. As an allegory of mobility, success and progress, Mumbai was on 26 November 2008 taken hostage and threatened by nine terrorists originating from the Pakistani countryside. The ’rural’ seems in that sense both a threatening force as a modus to survive in the big city.