Life Cycle

About the film

Life Cycle explores the place of the bicycle in the everyday lives of city dwellers in Kolkata. Are Kolkata’s bicycles relics of a past to be hastily discarded or are they viable, if complicated cargo vehicles in India’s burgeoning cities? Winding through Kolkata’s roads we follow the city’s daily wage workers, teachers and environmentalists and their changing relationships to cycling. What happens when new traffic regulations impede two-wheeled travellers from riding on Kolkata’s roads? How do vendors, couriers, newspaper sellers and artists negotiate Kolkata’s roads congested with cars and other motorized transport? Who wins the battle for the road – the bicycle or the car?Life Cycle is a tribute to the bicycle in uncertain times; and its relationship to rapidly changing cities.

Director Biography

Malini Sur is an anthropologist and a faculty at Western Sydney University. Since 2014, she been investigating how the bicycle mediates the changing relationship that daily wage workers and migrant vendors have with post-colonial cities in India. “Life Cycle” is her first documentary. Photographs from Malini’s fieldwork have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Gottingen, Heidelberg, Kathmandu and Munich. She has also curated for the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden/Amsterdam).