India, Aug. 9 -- Sai Paranjpye, 88, occupies a singular space in Indian film history. Neither aligned with mainstream Hindi cinema's spectacle nor entirely enclosed within the austere idiom of parallel cinema, her films created a third territory - one where humour, loneliness, aspiration and moral ambiguity unfolded in recognisably lived spaces.

In this meditation on cinema, memory and a city that survives most powerfully in the voices of ordinary people, the filmmaker reflects on Bombay not as a metropolis of landmarks, but as a fragile emotional ecosystem of chawls, gaalas, workers' dormitories and shared lives.

I never consciously thought that I must stand between two movements. These labels are usually created afterwards by critics ...