The Running Hawker

About the film

The film, shot over a period of three years, follows the lives of running hawkers on the trains of South Bengal in India. These hawkers belong to that overwhelming majority of India’s working population (over 90%) who are frequently described as ‘informal’. The film knits itself around four characters. Through the lives of these four hawkers, but also through a number of other characters who move in and out of the narrative, the filmmakers have tried to a presentation of the question of livelihood at a time when the world of commodity trade is increasingly moving to bigger sites of supermarkets and malls in India.

Director Biography

Abhijnan Sarkar moved to the city of Kolkata to attend higher education in Jadavpur University. He soon became a political activist and kept raising certain uncomfortable questions about social injustice. His debut film, The Running Hawker is also a part of his political activism. Presently he is working on two different documentaries; one on unorganized women workers of Kolkata involved in the garment industry and the other one on the migration of labor in Kolkata. Chandan Biswas is a a student of Film Studies from Jadavpur University who has delved into films, directing and editing films on contemporary social issues, Biswas’ ongoing projects are a documentary on an overlooked Bengali poet from the 70s, and a documentary on Muslim wedding folk songs of Bengal.