Baburao Ladsaheb is a actor, director, producer, mentor and cameraman. He runs 5 star acting school from his 10 ft / 10 ft home in the dense slum of Dharavi. The acting school that renders made easy methods of acting romantic, fighting ferocious and dancing sexy is thronged by pupils of all age groups. The Bollywood aspiration permeates into the lowest layers of the city and the failed actor turns into a local icon.   

A graduate of Film and Television Institute of India, Richa Husing works as a filmmaker and editor in Mumbai. She is a fellow of Commutiny Youth Collective working on ‘addressing information gaps in the area of food security through creation, compilation and use of audio visual materials’. Richa has directed Love Song, a documentary on urban relationships for PSBT in 2008. She has also worked for Godaam, a video archive project of Majlis and documented various community activities and livelihood practices in Dharavi and in a Muslim ghetto in Jogeswari.

Pila House (hybridisation of Play house) was marked as the entertainment district by the British Govt in 1857, in an area which was earlier designated as a graveyard.  The theatres were surrounded on one side by Kamathipura, the red light area and on the other side by Congress House, the residence of traditional musicians and dancers, including the much romanticised and much abused courtesans (tawaifs), all part of the symbol of urbanisation and urbane entertainment at the beginning of the 20th century. These theatres transformed their fares from variety entertainments to Parsee theatre to silent cinema to talkies.  Some of these theatres, a cluster of a dozen, still run at least three shows a day. As an architectural piece of layered history, jostling for popular attention, along with the flicks are structures of religious sites (mazhars and dargahs) in the same compound.

Abeer Gupta is an alumnus of the National Institute of Design, India, and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he studied visual anthropology. He has directed several short documentary films and executive produced Siddharth, the prisoner, which received the Critic’s Choice Award at the 2nd Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA), Gold Coast, Australia, 2008 and the Best Actor Award for Rajat Kapoor at 10th Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, New Delhi, 2008. He is currently based in Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, and is involved in research on visual and material cultures of the Tibetan Himalayas.