People I Saw Killed in a City & People I Killed in a City
Most of us don’t encounter violence directly; we encounter it through visual media and narratives; through films, and more recently, through videogames. What happens when the violence we see is staged, distorted, manipulated, or controlled? And how does this shape the way we learn to look at violence? My research for the films began with the online archive indiancine.ma, run by CAMP. From this archive, I started selecting clips from films such as Bombay, Satya, Company, Raman Raghav, Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2, Dil Se, Shootout at Lokhandwala, Johny Gaddar and others, where violent sequences are central to the narrative. In these films, I noticed how violence becomes personal, stylized. In Dil Se, for instance, violence becomes a backdrop for romance, where the context of conflict is ignored and the identity of the landscape is altered. My attention also turned to what gets erased in the scripting and visualization of violence in other films. I was especially drawn to anonymous deaths, characters with no identity, the extras, background dead bodies who only act as fillers in those films. Around this time, I came across Hitman (2018), a role-playing videogame set in a virtual representation of Mumbai, which also carried its own peculiar mix of visuals and storytelling. We explored how the game could be modded; short for modifications, player-made changes to a videogame that can alter visuals, rules, scripts, or even characters.
The film has two parts: People I Saw Killed in a City and People I Killed in a City. In People I Saw Killed in a City, two films are examined: Company (2002) by Ram Gopal Verma and Bombay (1995) by Mani Ratnam. Both are based on specific histories of violence in Mumbai. In these films, violence drives the story, but many characters die anonymously. They are shown without names, references, or identities, simply bodies to be shot, fillers to be discarded. I was interested in looking at who these people could be.Through this part, we examined the extras, imagining them through real archives, creating a friction between historical records and fictional representation. For Company (2002), archives excluded from Hussain Zaidi’s books on gang violence, legal documents, and newspapers were brought into play. For Bombay (1995), the archives included the People’s Verdict by the Indian People’s Human Rights Commission and the Srikrishna Commission Report.
In People I Killed in a City, the focus shifts to how violence is shown in the game, its aesthetics, its representations, and how I became a participant after being a spectator in the first part. Using mods, I reconstructed fragments of the gameplay narrative, pausing to look closely at those I had killed. Through this, NPCs (Non-Player Characters) were brought to the front, directly echoing the way Bollywood and videogames both use extras. In this way, the city becomes a stage where fiction and history overlap, blur, and sometimes erase one another through the lens of violence.
The film was made with CAMP, during the Inlaks Fine Art Awardees Residency Program in Mumbai, 2025.