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Documentaries & Experiments
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| Low Budget Libido
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Working Title: Low Budget Libido
Direction: Raj Amit Kumar
Crew: Uday Veer, Sunder Singh, Kanchan Kala, Sohan Chauhan, Dev Verma |
| Synopsis |
 Almost every city and town in India has at least one such theater that plays “sleaze” sexploitation films and thus acquires a social reputation identical to a brothel. The sleaze films that such a theater plays, and the female actresses in those films, have a social reputation analogous to prostitutes who stand in the silver-screen, inviting, and to some extent gratifying, the Indian male audience. Almost one-fourth of the Hindi films circulating every year are the C-grade-sleaze films “meant for frontbenchers in small towns.” In Indian theaters, as far and as high as one sits with respect to screen, one pays more, and is thus classified as member of a “higher-better” class. In the popular imagination, “sleaze” films are for frontbenchers, for those who sit close to the screen, in lower-stalls, and not for those who sit in the upper-stalls or balconies. In short, the sleaze films are for a “lower-class.” For the popular imagination, the lower-stall suggests not only an economically lower-class audience but also a “no-class” or “lowbrow-taste” as well.
The mainstream film industry in India also makes sex-based films, but popular discourse degrades the ultra-low-budget, star-less, sex-based films as sleaze, XXX, adult, soft porn, B, C, and Z grade. The social reputation of sex-films and of the people—producers, distributors, theater owners, and audience—associated with these productions is the motivation for this documentary. Embracing an already “normalized” term—sleaze— this documentary exposes the construction of low-class status for those associated with the exhibition, audience, distribution, and production of these films. It also sets out to strike a contrast with how mainstream sexual imagery is “more legit and classy” yet equally pornographic. This work attempts to locate the morality attached to sexual media in its class base. |
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