| TITLE OF THE FILM | Music in a Village Named 1PB (1PB Mein Sufiyana Qalam) |
| DIRECTED BY | Surabhi Sharma |
| LANGUAGE | Saraiki, Hindi (English subtitles) |
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COUNTRY | India |
| DURATION | 130 minutes |
| SPECIAL NOTE | Kolkata Premiere |
PRINCIPAL CREW & CAST
| CINEMATOGRAPHY | R.V. Ramani |
| EDITING | Diksha Sharma |
| LOCATION SOUND | Amala Popuri |
| SOUND DESIGN | Amala Popuri |
| SOUND MIXING | Dhiman Karmakar |
| MUSIC | Mir community |
ABOUT THE FILM
In a landscape of shifting sands, a community enclosed into grids with no name, just a number, rehearses its music in villages like 1 PB, a dot in the Thar desert, at the Indian side of the India-Pakistan border.
This landscape is home to Mirs, a muslim community who are the custodians of a timeless poetry, and practitioners of a music not bound to ‘quam’ (religion) or ‘desh’ (nation). But the land has now degraded, boundaries have hardened and the music has become a whisper. This film gleans songs and poems to stitch a portrait of a group of musicians struggling to keep their inheritance of Islamic Sufi and Hindu Bhakti music alive.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Surabhi has been an independent filmmaker making feature-length documentaries and short films since 2000. Her documentaries, fiction, and video installations engage with cities in transition using the lens of labour, music, and migration. Surabhi is Associate Professor of Practice at the Film and New Media program and is currently serving as Associate Dean for the Arts and Creative Practices at the New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
‘Music in a Village Named 1 PB’ is a portrait of the Mirs. In this film we honour our time spent with the singers, to listen to the limitlessness, the beauty, the harshness of the landscape evoked by their music. Our encounters blurred the lines between remembering and forgetting, music immersed us in the eternal wait for clouds heavy with rain.
I began shooting this film as an attempt to archive the Mirs’ rich musical tradition. In recent years, the need to complete this film acquired urgency with the growing invisibilization of syncretic legacies of collective life and living in the country, and the increasing violence against minorities in the subcontinent.
