By filmmaker Faraz Ali's own admission, the idea of Shoebox began as a coffee-table book, before that idea morphed into a documentary and finally into the film that it is now.
Yet, watching the film, being screened in the Indian Cinema Now category at the ongoing 26th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in the capital, one would not associate it with an impersonal, glossy coffee-table book, except for the presence of some arresting frames of a city.
Shoebox is set around a time of the city's transformation, not only in its name, but in what it stands for. Ali began shooting the film when Allahabad was being renamed as Prayagraj. What was presented as a reclaiming of a long lost past was in a sense an erasure of more recent memories and even the lived present. The film draws a parallel between this transformation and a more personal story of Madhav, a Bengali living in Allahabad, who is fighting to retain the ownership of Palace Cinema, an old single-screen theatre in a prime piece of land where a builder wants to construct a multiplex.
