Rahila Gupta

The Unreliable Narrator

I collaborate occasionally with Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, a pair of artists whose work stretches artistic boundaries to explore political themes. The collaboration is always very liberating for me. For this short film by Mirza and Butler, I co-wrote the script and did the voiceover.

A video installation The Unreliable Narrator narrates the 2008 Mumbai attacks, alternately from a position of the terrorists and of a seemingly impartial commentator. The video sourced from CCTV recordings of the siege, together with telephone conversations between the attackers and their controllers, suggest that the event was performed for the benefit of news cameras: “this is just a trailer, the main feature is yet to come”.