The film shows glimpses of the everyday vending culture, in the growing town of Damak in the East of Nepal. It highlights the precarity of their day to day practices during the pandemic as the government imposed restrictions on business hours and movement. I use poetic gestures to interweave these snippets of reality with a collage of images and shreds of conversation gathered between the shopkeepers and their customers. In doing so, the film interrogates the notion of the commons through the narratives of the vendors themselves and highlights how easily public spaces become sites for new struggles in an effort to define community.
2020
video (7 min 50 sec)
IP2117
Text & images © Max Limbu