17 Jun

20:30

WORM Rotterdam

Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam

A screening of Prem Kapoor's legendary, almost lost queer classic from India, Badnam Basti (1971), a story of a truck driver drawn to the man he hires.

BADNAM BASTI aka Alley of Ill Repute

More info & tickets

Badnam Basti aka Alley of Ill Repute
by Prem Kapoor
India, 1971, 83 minutes, Hindi w/ English subtitles

Prem Kapoor's debut feature Badnam Basti (1971) is a legendary, almost lost queer classic from India. Adapted from Kamleshwar's 1957 novel Ek Sadak Sattavan Galiyan (A Street with Fifty-Seven Lanes), it follows Sarnam, a bandit-turned-truck-driver who rescues Bansuri from assault, then finds himself drawn to Shivraj, a temple-bred cleaner he hires onto his truck. "I thirst for you," Sarnam tells him.

Shot in black-and-white over four weeks in Mainpuri, the film was initially edited by Hrishikesh Mukherjee before Kapoor himself re-cut it. To clear the censor board, Kapoor pared the novel's homoeroticism down to suggestion. He had studied erotic temple sculpture for his doctoral thesis, and the film's visual language draws openly on German Expressionism and the Nouvelle Vague.

A 35mm print, sent to Mannheim in 1972, was rediscovered at Berlin's Arsenal archive in 2019; restoration was recently finished, and was led by Kapoor's son Hariom.