Trombaywala & Sons
Directed by Bani Abidi and Priya Sen · Director of Photography
A cross-border feature-length documentary and speculative video essay looking at the maritime relations between two major port cities of the Arabian Sea: Karachi and Bombay. The project is a collaboration between filmmakers and friends Bani Abidi and Priya Sen.
How do port cities, by their very nature, evade and hence defy present ethno-nationalist narratives and become instead deep sites of knowledge that present interwoven imaginaries of the past and possible futures?
The film will be stationed at the Qatar Art Museum as part of its quadrennial exhibition, Unruly Waters, this fall, as a three-channel video installation.
A short collage from the film. The film is currently in post-production.
I produced and directed the Karachi leg of the filming, under the long-distance conceptual direction of the two directors, in July and August 2026.
Along the way, I documented various corners of the city's coastal strip, including the fishing villages of Ibrahim Hyderi, Baba Island and Bhitt Island & Mubarak Village; Hawke's Bay; Seaview; the Moriro Graves, Daryalal Mandir, Khwaja Khizar's thikana and the Native Jetty Bridge, along with other shrines of coastal communities in Karachi.
The film features conversations with Majeed Motani, a long-time fisherman and community activist from Ibrahim Hyderi; Toxy Cowasjee, a member of the historic Cowasjee family of the shipping company of the same name; Sabzal Baloch, a member of the Zikri community at Mubarak Village; Swaleh, an indigenous digital cartographer from Baba Island; and the owners of the 'Bombay' shops of Saddar, shops whose names begin with 'Bombay', including Bombay Lighthouse, Bombaywala and Bombay Nimco.