Sensorial Methodologies and Extended Urbanization

2.00pm / Film Screening

“Not Just Roads”

70’, DCP, Colour (India, Switzerland, Germany)

Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou

An ethnographic documentary film that narrates the story of a massive urban transformation underway in India. Highways are being constructed at an unprecedented rate of 23 kilometers per day under the Indian government's Bharatmala (‘Glarland of Limitless Roads’) program. The program aims to open new territories for the emerging Indian middle class. Currently, the territory is inhabited by villages, working class neighbourhoods, and nomadic herders. It is criss-crossed by native trails and vital ecological commons. This film captures the story of one such highway outside Delhi, from the perspective of human and non-human actors.

3.30pm / Book Launch

“Cinema and the City in the Era of Planetary Urbanization”

Nitin Bathla / Silvia Cipelletti / Markus Lähteenmäki / Klearjos Papanicolaou (eds.)

This book talk explores how cinema can function not only as a medium of representation but as a method of urban research. Discussing Cinema and the City in the Era of Planetary Urbanisation (2026, JOVIS), Nitin Bathla examines how film opens alternative ways of sensing, documenting, and analysing contemporary urbanisation across urban centres, infrastructural corridors, and extended urban landscapes. The talk reflects on cinema as a situated and embodied practice of inquiry that intervenes in how urbanisation is made visible and intelligible, and will be accompanied by the screening of selected excerpts from the open-access film Not Just Roads.

• Nitin Batlha
• Junia Mortimer
• Olivia Casagrande
• Juan Miguel Kanai
• Jonathan Silver