India in 180"

A travel reportage shot in India by Daniele Di Mauro during a personal trip, and compressed into one hundred and eighty seconds. The title states the constraint outright: three minutes for a country that does not fit in them.

The route runs across the north: Varanasi on the Ganges, then Rajasthan with Pushkar, Jaipur and Jodhpur. These are places with little in common — the holy city on the water, the desert cities — and that is the real editing problem of the film: holding them together without turning them into a list of stops.

Among the footage is the evening ceremony on the ghats of Varanasi, lamps lit along the steps, the crowd watching from the bank and from boats. It is a scene that films itself, and that is exactly what makes it hard: anyone pointing a camera at it comes away with something beautiful, so the only way to stand apart is to choose where to watch it from.

It is the one piece in the portfolio made with no client and no crew. That changes everything. Nothing is set up in advance, you don’t go back to reshoot, and every image is the one you managed to catch while it was happening. The edit becomes the place where the film is really written — where footage gathered by accumulation is sorted into what is story and what stays a note.

The three-minute limit is the decision that holds the whole thing together. A trip produces hours of material and the temptation is to show as much as possible; imposing a running time this tight forces you to keep only what stands on its own, without the context that the person who was there carries in their head and the viewer does not.