Poetry in Action RACISM AND RESISTANCE IN PARTHO SEN-GUPTA’S SLAM
The latest feature by Sydney-based filmmaker Partho Sen-Gupta, Slam (2018), is haunted by a terrifying moment from his past. As a child growing up in Mumbai, he paid scant attention to dire warnings from his parents about the threat of kidnappings until, one terrifying day, when he was around seven or eight years old, a man attempted to snatch him outside his home. ‘I didn’t realise then how traumatic an experience that was,’ he recalls of the startling near-miss that haunts him, especially now that he has become a father himself.
For many years, the memory was locked away within a dark recess in the 54-year-old director’s mind. But the full weight of the attack rammed back into his consciousness when he saw a poster of a missing girl on a return trip to Mumbai: ‘It all came back to me.’ His partner, Alana Lentin, a political sociologist and social theorist at Western Sydney University, was pregnant at the time, and the creeping trauma sparked a primal dread in Sen-Gupta. ‘I took a look at the statistics, which I had completely ignored until then, and realised something like 100,000 children had vanished,’ he says. Indeed, according to a 2017 paper, some eleven children go missing every hour in India, four of whom are never recovered.1
During a recent trip back to India to visit his
