The Ballet Boys Of Mumbai
by The Daily Eye Team June 12 2017, 5:01 pm Estimated Reading Time: 0 mins, 45 secsSooni Taraporevala’s first virtual reality film captures the journey of two boys from Mumbai’s chawls to a ballet school in the US We first see Manish Chauhan, 21, and Amiruddin Shah, 15, the protagonists of a new film Yeh Ballet, in a half-empty Mumbai local train, pirouetting with the support of overhead handles. The boys, from lower-middle-class homes in Ulwe and Sanpada in Navi Mumbai, respectively, have got full scholarships to study dance for a year at The School of Oregon Ballet Theatre in the US and they can’t contain their excitement. If you turn around—and you can because this film is in virtual-reality format—you see the director, Sooni Taraporevala, in black clothes and shades. Over six months in 2016, Taraporevala documented the everyday lives of Chauhan and Shah, before they boarded the flight to the US.