150 Seconds Ago

In January 2001, an earthquake destroyed, in a matter of minutes, the almost-500-year-old city of Bhuj in the Gujarat province. What disappeared was not only the palace, the ramparts and historic streets, but also a whole world of legends, traditions and culture. Whereas the inevitable process of change is normally perceived by individuals as a gradual change, here, time and space were totally compressed in a few fatal seconds, changing the lives of thousands of people in the Kutch region and depriving them of a part of themselves. During the year following the catastrophe, the filmmaker followed the lives of the inhabitants. Her various encounters’be it with the rickshaw man, the maharajah, the surgeon, the ONG worker or the architects’enable her to show how attitudes are changing: from the clearing up of the ruins to the first rebuilding projects, from the mourning to the will to live again, from despair to action.