The Landscape of Sanatoriums

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This experimental video essay explores the space and time of a post-colonial hill station set up by the British as a sanatorium for therapeutic recovery from the heat and humidity of India. Invoking the closing sequences of Ritwik Ghatak’s film, Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) (1960), the film explores how mountains became a metaphor not just for malaise and affliction, but also the human will to survive in the corridors of a creaky healthcare system. Framed through fissures in the dark, derelict walls of a once glorious cinema hall in Darjeeling, the events within turn, hang in liquid suspension. The same landscape becomes a haven for the tourist-turned-environmental-refugee who crawls up the winding mountainside in summer, fleeing the furnace of the Indian plains. But the haven itself is occupied by giant pile drivers pounding steel into the industrial night.