Directors & star on commemorative documentary, 'Tomorrow We Disappear'

Filmmakers and former college roommates Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber discuss their passion-project documentary, Tomorrow We Disappear, which premiered at Tribeca last Saturday.

The Kathputli artists’ colony in western New Delhi, India, is a community riven with and composed of paradoxes. The bright cerulean walls of the area’s makeshift buildings are beautiful; they shelter

Jimmy Goldblum

slum conditions, which include poor sewage systems and an abundance of piled trash. The artists engage in centuries’ old craftwork; they also carry modern cellphones. Community members frequently bicker and become embroiled in shouting arguments, seemingly unable to reach consensus on important issues affecting the whole; community members are in almost universal accord on one issue that threatens to affect, perhaps dismantle, the whole entirely: They do not want to leave Kathputli under present conditions.

The documentary Tomorrow We Disappear follows three members of the Kathputli community throughout what has evolved into a prolonged legal battle. The Indian government is trying to displace Kathputli residents. Fifty years ago the colony’s ancestors, a group of traditionally migrant artists, settled on unpopulated government land and made camp. For half a century officials have been content to let these families domesticize the formerly untamed grounds and practice their traditional art, which includes puppetry, acrobatics, magic tricks, dance, painting, and others, largely unbothered.

So, what’s changed? A thriving metropolis, New Delhi, has grown up around Kathputli. According to Disappear co-director and producer Jimmy Goldblum, “Basically, now that there are 23 million people in a metropolitan area, they’ve reached their horizontal limit, and now need to start going vertical. So [the government] just decided to build the first skyscraper in the city.” The Indian government is working with development company Arabtec to, yes, build a skyscraper, and luxury buildings, on the land Kathputli residents have made their home.

Goldblum and his co-director and fellow producer Adam Weber are a pair of earnest Brooklynite filmmakers who have become demonstrably invested in the fate of the Kathputli artists. They call the documentary’s most prominent subject, Puran Bhatt, internationally renowned puppeteer and recipient of India’s prestigious National Award for traditional arts, a friend and family. They are insistent a great injustice is being perpetrated against Bhatt and his neighbors. The government has offered to relocate Kathputli residents to new flats in exchange for moving. They have constructed a camp of transitional homes to house the artists while construction on the flats is underway. But no one has told the Kathputli artists for how long they will be living in transitional houses, nor what, exactly, their new homes will look like on the other end. The lack of details strikes Kathputli denizens as suspicious. Until they get answers, they vow not to move.

“It’s not unreasonable,” says Weber of the artists’ demands. “It’s not like they’ll never move. Obviously, some people do say that, but before they consider moving they need to know what they’re going to get in return, how long this will be, in writing, so they can feel more comfortable.” The filmmakers have put the colony’s list of demands online. “We’re trying to make that transparent.”

Such a story rife with universal themes -- past vs. present, tradition vs. progress, art vs. commerce -- naturally found its point of entry for the two former English majors in a novel.

Says Goldblum, “A while back [Weber] recommended to me this book Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and I finally got around to reading it about four years ago. Very late into that book the main character actually goes into a magicians’ ghetto. It was so vividly described, I really had no

Adam Weber

idea how [Rushdie] could have come up with the imagery. I was wondering if it was based on anything. So I Googled India plus magicians’ ghetto, and found a little Times of India article that they were planning on knocking down the Kathputli colony. And [Weber] and I had been looking for a long time to find a project to collaborate on, so I sent him the article, and I would say, what, like seven weeks we were probably there. It was a pretty fortuitous series of events.”

Weber agrees. “We got there and the story was happening. We fell into the lap of the story, of them getting displaced, finally, after all these years. We just kind of knew at that point it would turn into a feature doc. We came back, our first shoot, with 200 hours of footage.”

Although they interviewed “probably 15 artists at the end of the day,” Weber and Goldblum decided to structure their film around three personalities in particular: Bhatt, the puppeteer and most well-known colony inhabitant; Maya, an acrobat and one of the community’s more forward-facing minds; and Raman, a magician, soft-spoken and caught between the traditions he knows and the coming future he would rather not think about.

The directors’ interest in another book, Net of Magic, led them first to Raman. “[Magic] focuses on a magician, so we went to the colony looking for him. His name’s Naseeb. We had an interview with Naseeb, and behind him was his son, another magician, who’s just very brooding and you could tell he had a lot he wanted to say but didn’t know his place. He had a very different take on the colony. That ended up being Raman,” says Weber.

“I think the only trick in finding Puran,” Goldblum says of the puppeteer Weber calls “the most famous person in the colony,” was to “make sure you find the real one, because so many people pretend to be him. Because he’s so well respected. They’re like, ‘It’s me! I’ve won a national award!’”

In fact, all three subjects were “easy” choices. It was more difficult for the predominantly male film crew to speak with the women of the “modest, private sort of culture,” says Weber. But Maya, who doesn’t live with her father and who is one of the best acrobats in Kathputli, was different. When she was four, Maya was hit by a bus while performing in the streets of New Delhi. We never learn the specifics or extent of her injuries, but Maya’s mother tells us the accident rendered her daughter unfit for marriage.

“It’s kind of interesting,” says Goldblum, “because a lot of people have come up to us and said, ‘Could you tell us more about what that means?’ And it’s so funny because that idea is so commonplace in South Asian culture, where a mother is very, very concerned about the purity of the daughter and making sure the daughter is OK for marriage. So if you have any disease, if anything has happened to you, anything, you try to hide it because it won’t make you suitable for marriage. It’s just like breathing the air there. It’s not even a thing.”

He continues, “Whereas to us, it just seems like, are you kidding me? She’s this beautiful, talented, wonderfully perspectival human being, and it’s just so crazy” that she wouldn’t marry. Of the film’s three subject, Maya is the only one who regards moving out of Kathputli as a positive change. It’s Maya who brings our attention to the community’s poor living conditions, the trash and dirt, the pragmatic problems attenuate with living in a slum, even a slum that produces great works of art. “She just doesn’t look at the future with trepidation. She’s already gone through so much, what’s another trial to her?” Goldblum asks.

“I don’t underestimate Maya,” adds Weber, and Goldblum agrees. “If the movie helps Maya get married that would make me happy,” he says.

But the filmmakers’ agenda is broader than a marriage plot. (Although after speaking with Bhatt their ideas on love have shifted: “We’re totally on board with arranged marriages,” says Weber. “Yeah, we’re all getting arranged marriages,” Goldblum assents.) They invited Bhatt to spend several days in New York as they promoted Disappear.

Weber explains, “He’s here to support the film, but also he’s here to see if there’s something he can do, and talking to as many people as he can. And he’s especially good at it. Hopefully something will happen.”

Puran Bhatt

Towards the end of Tomorrow We Disappear Bhatt describes his ideal future for the colony and presents a picture he’s drawn. The crude, colorful rendering depicts a neighborhood-cum-tourist-center, an area where the artists would both live and invite interested outsiders to visit and learn about residents’ work.

“The issue isn’t really that we need homes,” says Bhatt, speaking through translator Grant Davis, who just so happened to be a former roommate of Weber’s, fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and in possession of an encyclopedic knowledge of Bollywood films, “it’s that we get to keep our livelihood… Our art is so deeply ingrained in the way we live. One of the really important issues is for artists that work with our hands. Someone like myself, I make puppets, beginning with a small one-foot puppet to a large 15-foot puppet. If you put me on the second floor of this building and I’m hammering away and I make all this noise, what is the person living below me going to say? They’re just going to call the police, and just say, ‘What is this guy doing? Get him out of here.’ What’s going to happen when we move to these flats, it’s not an environment in which we can work.”

Tomorrow We Disappear is itself a work of art, created for the purposes of commemorating the work and lifestyles of these artists. The film is richly photographed, with interplays of light, bright colors, still frames, and, in perhaps one of the few instances in which the effect can be called tasteful, slow-motion showcased throughout. DPs Josh Cogan and Will Bisanta were largely to thank, as were some challenging shooting conditions.

“We went during two extremely hard seasons for foreigners,” says Weber.

“For human beings,” Goldblum rejoins.

“For human beings. It was summer and winter. ..A lot of the movie is actually really beautiful because the sun was always at angle when we were shooting, because overhead it was too hot. So the movie has this diffuse light all over, the sun’s always rising or setting throughout the whole thing, and that’s because it was really hard for us to get outside.”

Yet “outside,” in open homes and meandering alleyways, is precisely where Bhatt and the rest of the Kathputli residents would like to remain.

Says Bhatt, “The question is, what’s important for us? A house, a home, a place to live, or our art. If our art gets preserved, then our home, a house, somewhere to live is just going to come out of it. If you want to give us a place to live, that’s fine. [But] build four walls for us, put us inside, lock the door -- art is finished. End of story. It’s our life. It hurts.”