On Wednesday 15th April, @mothership.marrickville, Miya Miya Film Club presents: মহানগর (Mahanagar / The Big City, India, 1963) directed by Satyajit Ray.
Mahanagar is presented in collaboration with Neil Kumar whose practice sits at the intersection of typography, memory and cultural inheritance. Neil’s work often draws from vernacular design histories across the subcontinent; reclaiming, reworking and re-seeing visual languages many of us grew up around but rarely paused to notice. It feels right to hold Mahanagar alongside that lens with modernity arriving at the doorstep, tradition reshaping itself in real time.
Set in 1960s Calcutta, Mahanagar follows Arati, a middle-class housewife who takes up a job as a saleswoman to support her family, and in doing so, gently unsettles the fragile architecture of patriarchy at home. What unfolds is subtle but seismic. A film about work, dignity, womanhood and the quiet courage it takes to step outside the line drawn for you.
As always, this isn’t just a screening. It’s a gathering.
On the night, we’ll be sharing food from @_thals and @greeneggsandhamza. Plates that feel like home, like aunties in the kitchen, like the hum of something familiar and generous.
We’ll also be splitting donations between Katha, a Delhi-based organisation working in education, literacy and storytelling with children from underserved communities and The Aunties Fund, a Sydney-based volunteer-led organisation that supports South Asian women escaping domestic violence. Both organisations, in different ways, honour the spirit of Mahanagar: women’s agency, economic independence, and the transformative power of access.
As always, your ticket includes a meal, drinks from @gazacola.au, a donation to @kathaindia and The Aunties Fund via @sydneycommunityfoundation, as well as covering venue and projector hire, and film licencing.
Mahanagar will be screened in Bengali with English subtitles. Ray made this film over sixty years ago, but it feels startlingly current. The negotiation between care and ambition. The politics of income inside a marriage. The invisible labour that props up the “respectable” household. The way a city can both swallow you and set you free.
Come sit with us in the big city.
We’ll see you soon ❤️