The Vanishing Prairie

A group of university students stand up against rape culture, and have to overcome great difficulties to make their voices heard.

If he's said it once, he's said it a million times, 'I AM the real life Rocky.' And so it begins. Steve Mitchell launches into his life story for anyone willing to listen. And make no mistake - he's not telling you just to hear himself talk. Steve is asking you to help make him a star.

The film, shot over a period of three years, follows the lives of running hawkers on the trains of South Bengal in India. These hawkers belong to that overwhelming majority of India's working population (over 90%) who are frequently described as 'informal'. This informality is constituted by a state of suspension in the zone between legality and illegality. Through the lives of four such hawkers among other characters, we have tried to address the question of the hawkers' livelihood at a time when the world of commodity trade is increasingly moving to bigger sites of supermarkets and malls in India. But what we also try to do is gauge what goes on in the interstices of livelihood. Our principal interlocutors then appear as instances for consideration of not only how the trade of 'hawking' is actualised but also how such questions of livelihood become embroiled with or are mediated through singular desires and ambitions. In this lies the representational challenge that our film has taken up.