The Neolithic Hongshan of China, Cambodia’s Khmer Empire, the inhabitants of Pakistan’s Indus Valley, the Anasazi—cultures up and vanish all the time in world history. And as tragic as the loss of these cultures may be, it might be more tragic that in certain cases we’re not even sure what, exactly, happened to them. Solving the first problem requires a lot of different parts moving in unison. Solving the second just requires a guy to sling a camera. In Tomorrow We Disappear, Jim Goldblum and Adam Weber take the chance to document a contemporary culture that’s on the precipice of dying out: the artists’ colony of Kathputli in New Delhi. If you’ve read Salman Rushdie, you’ve heard of this community, though you might not realize it at first.
Rushdie wrote about Kathputli, the “magician’s ghetto,” in his landmark second novel, Midnight’s Children. In the book, the slum is bulldozed to the ground as soldiers yank residents out of their homes and arrest them. In Tomorrow We Disappear, the situation in Kathputli never grows quite so dire, but that’s not to say the settlement’s disposition is especially cheery, either. As its fate hangs in the balance, Goldblum and Weber capture Kathputli’s mood by following a select number of its tenants over several years. There’s puppeteer Puran Bhat, street magician Rehman Shah, and acrobat Maya Pawar: They’ve each spent their whole lives in Kathputli, but none can agree on how best to meet its impending demolition.
Which might be the biggest surprise of Tomorrow We Disappear, that Goldblum and Weber don’t spoon feed their viewers black-and-white perspectives on their subject matter. The Indian government wants to dismantle Kathputli and install a shopping center and high rises on the land—in a Hollywood film, the developers would be mean-mugging scoundrels, Kathputli’s artists would be scrappy, heroic underdogs, and, in the end, commerce would hit a brick wall comprised of people united to stop industry’s grinding wheels. In Goldblum’s and Weber’s film, those developers are still pretty goddamn scummy—you get the sense that the lead on the project wears sunglasses just to cover up dollar signs floating in his pupils—but when the people come together, they tend to bicker and squabble. What’s really best for Kathputli?